Party as Form

Residency 27, Party as Form, invites a multidisciplinary group of thinkers and makers to explore the craft of social gathering.

Party as Form takes the craft of celebration as the starting point for a residency that blends cultural theory with current experiments in curating, social practice and performance. This four-week residency offers up to four Oslo-based and two international artists, art workers and other creative, critical, and cultural practitioners the opportunity to work with Lloyd and Stratton on collective research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. 

Based in Chicago, curator and writer Shannon Stratton taught the first session of Party as Form at Ox-Bow School of Art in 2012. Her class was inspired by a syllabus she inherited for a class on Utopias, and was designed as an approach to social practice through critical readings into theories and practices of celebratory social gatherings. Party as Form took a horizontal approach to the process of knowledge production, resulting in a format for thinking and collective making from which former students have created present-day projects, practices and syllabi.

Kelly Lloyd, a transdisciplinary artist and educator based in London, focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Throwing parties formed a part of her practice prior to her encounter with the Party as Form syllabus. Afterwards, it became a more intentional component, and on inheriting the delivery of Party as Form at Ox-Bow, she has brought a further dimension to the course: exploring ways that parties can be opportunities for marginalized people to explore their differences, embrace the necessity of leisure, and envision and enact a more just commons. 

Parties take hugely diverse forms and serve a galaxy of purposes: reinforcing long standing friendships, marking anniversaries, making space for people to express and celebrate their particular identities, helping people to feel they belong within a new social setting. They can be used to raise funds and aid the generation of new ideas and new enterprises, but equally they are an opportunity to let rip and ditch formalities. Some involve painstaking preparation while others are spontaneous, low-key and low-fuss. Whatever the form, the choreography of parties begs lots of questions. Who gets invited, and why? What’s the venue: how does it shape the dynamic? What foods or drinks are on offer, and what do they mean? What are the qualities of a good (or bad) host – or a good (or bad) guest? 

Lloyd and Shannon seek to convene a group of practitioners interested in the party as a form, whether this is already the foundation of their practice or a potential lens through which to continue their research. The residency will be a think-tank-style sharing of ideas and resources that allows for both group and solo planning and ideas-testing. In the process we will look in detail at the history, aesthetics, labor, and conventions of parties, from the intimate to the public, the religious to the secular. Topics may include (but not necessarily be limited to) liminality, community, hosting, the formation of publics, spectacle, utopias, leisure, play, pleasure, refusal, ritual and the commons.

The group will collectively plan a schedule at the residency’s outset, including daily group meetings and activities (such as readings, discussions, visits to relevant spaces in Oslo, networking events, communal meals, leisure outings, and deployments) alongside unstructured time for independent reflection and research. In the first week, residents will participate in PRAKSIS’s customary “Meet the Residents” event, informally introducing themselves to the rest of the group and the Oslo arts community.

What the Residency Provides

• An active, facilitated programme connected with the residency topic. 

• A communal work space at PRAKSIS, in the center of Oslo.

• 3000 NOK for two international artists. 

• Comfortable accommodation for 2 international artists, sharing a flat with Kelly Lloyd and Shannon Stratton. Oslo-based residents will continue to stay at their local address.

• Two group dinners with invited guests and simple lunches on weekdays held at PRAKSIS HQ.