tell us about your motivations to become mobile

On the level of my artistic creation, being mobile through artist's residencies is for me a source of energy and renewal. Mobility decontextualize my usual framework and I find myself questioning and seeking new solutions. My motivations? Openness, exchange, challenge, ...

Romeo, what is your "usual framework"? I thought that you live in residencies and have no home.

My question is that can too much mobility lead to a situation where the artist lives outside of the real world, everyday life and their problems.

well I guess if you have too much mobility, whatever that might be, than that becomes your reality and why not?

That depends what classes or masses are your target audience and how you see the role of the art and the artist in the society.

Nowadays, I wonder if mobility is not becoming (or shaping) another way of living in the "real world" and experiencing "every day life" ?

Hi all
Sorry for joining in a little late, but I've got an ocean and a continent between us. Anyways I just wanted to contribute with this:
personally mobility has become a necessity, first because I am one of those artist who works from specific socio-cultural contexts. In other words new places (for me) generate new contexts from which I can strive. Of course, one could argue that I could also stay in the same spot and keep digging in. This is where the second element of my research comes into play. Because of my personal experience (bi-national-bi lingual/ Euro-American) I am particularly invested in the post-colonial question, and its global derivatives. Therefore I am interested in seeing and immersing myself in the nuanced network that is the colonial legacy (i.e. the United States and England are very different, yet they are historically and culturally connected; the Netherlands and Indonesia are extremely different but they share a history, and now people, since there is movement to and fro between the two countries, etc.) This context is my material. That is why I just can't stay put in Paris, or Chicago forever. And sometimes I need to revisit places I have been to before. In one of the many proposals that I've written lately, I said something like: displacement is at the core of contemporary human experience. We have to remember that with the globalization of finances comes the globalization of the work force. Workers have to produce this capital (be they manual or intellectual labourers), so they are on the move too. Recently, Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio had an exhibition together at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. In there they mapped out the displacement of migrants over the next 50 years (if I recall correctly) and they estimated the number of migrants at about 1 billion (I'm not exactly sure of the figure, but it was a big number of that order), that's one billion people constantly moving (not necessarily the same people), but there will be a perpetual flow of 1 billion people. This is obviously going to have emotional, psychological, and hopefully cultural repercussion. Artists are cultural producers, so they need to be part of this. Or at least some artists do. I'm one of them. Had I been born a few centuries back, I probably would have been an explorer. Now, I'm a global traveler (which is very different from a tourist, I dont' just take snapshots and get expensive massages at exotic resorts). I travel in order to study and engage with various contexts. This takes time, thus the need for residencies, and networking tools like this forum to keep in touch, to establish contacts, etc.

Being mobile is very important for an artist’s work, because it takes us out from the comfort zone of our studios, our house, our usual surrounding. Going somewhere for the first time, makes you an alien, which means you need to discover the place and find your own place in there, to adapt to certain customs, and to try and breathe the space around you. In my own experience and from my fellow artists, we don’t travel like other tourists, we look carefully around us and don’t run from one sightseeing tour to the other, and later just show photos to our friend from where we’ve been. I think what artists bring is experience from a certain trip, and that inevitably reflects in one’s work, if not directly than indirectly inspired. Of course, being in another place, can also be a bubble in time, but I find those bubbles most inspiring and productive.