We arrived at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in late October 2019. After years changing countries month by month, and another month traveling overland across all of Asia, to spend all this time in one place seemed to us equal to a lifetime.
The situation provided by Swatch is complete luxury: every artist is given their own room and studio, with complete creative control over how they spend their days. The hotel was built in 1908 and is situated on the Bund, the unique waterfront area along which historic buildings from the original international settlements in Shanghai look out to the more recently developed Pudong skyscrapers. After a month sleeping on trains, it was an unimaginable accommodation for us, and we immediately felt ready to get to work.
In November, we had the opportunity to participate in an exhibition in Hangzhou at the China Academy of Art called Inter-World-View that brought people from China and around the world together, and whose participants ran the gamut from chefs to meteorologists. It was an interesting time in another beautiful city, and an excellent occasion to meet with our partners from Beijing, AnyOne, to discuss the first ideas for the release of our next album.
Our work at Swatch took a more serious development when we set out on creating from scratch electronic instruments by hand, a followup to our work on Vis-à-Vis. Just as we began to dive into this project, the first outbreak of COVID-19 began in Wuhan. We watched the time pass by as the Chinese New Year holiday was extended from one week to the next, and spent our time inside working away at our electronic instrument and new compositions. As the outbreak worsened, other artists from Swatch decided to return to their home countries one by one, and by February we were the only residents left at the hotel. In this bizarre alternative reality, we found ourselves the recipients of this strange luxury, a fully staffed hotel, the only residents in sight, in a barren city with empty streets.
Completing our musical instrument project that we call the Fuzzy Synth, was definitely a silver lining to this crisis, and we felt really proud to have done something productive with our time despite the circumstance.
Our trace at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel
In the midst of all of this, and thanks to the ceaseless work of our partners AnyOne, we managed to release our album Vis-à-Vis as planned. It was one of our most satisfying moments as an ensemble.
In our last months, we focused considerably on a newly conceived idea, called One Meter Per Minute that centered around the fossilization of one-minute-long compositions for paper-fed music boxes into visual artworks. In all, we made five pieces, leaving one as a trace (the artwork left behind by each artist in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel).
You can explore all the traces left by past artists of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in their virtual museum.
Finally, we were also able to present, through both live and streaming events, the music of our new album at Ming Contemporary Art Museum, HOW Art Museum, and Raffaella Gallo’s ARTCaffè. It was a great way of wrapping up our stay in Shanghai, sharing our music with audiences for the first time in the new year.
We’ll end by showing our, perhaps cheesy, entry into the guest book given to artists at the end of their stay. It’s created from the letter we received near the start of the virus in China that seemed to dominate all conversations and actions during the remainder of our stay. Our omissions highlight something we feel is extremely poignant though, that even in these strange times artist residencies provide to the world something that is very essential.
In 2020, or any year, it’s so difficult to give oneself permission to be an artist. Artists must face the adversity of society everyday, that tells them what they do is less important than something more urgent. We believe that in addition to bringing to the world things which directly reduce suffering (something our music perhaps cannot), we must also introduce to the world things that spark joy and cultivate communities (something we believe our music can). The duo’s philosophy is that beyond food, shelter, and clothing art itself is the fourth basic human need. Even during the pandemic, Swatch gave us the permission and resources needed to continue to make this music we believe in.
