This destination was Studio Faire, an artist residency located in southwestern France in the sleepy, yet vibrant commune of Nérac. Studio Faire is a maison de maître that acts both as contemporary arts space and living quarters for its residents. This mansion was built in the 1800s and still retains its period characteristics.
Julia and Colin were amazing hosts, and
I’m grateful for them in letting me into their home and this slice of paradise.
I truly admire what they are doing: creating and cultivating a space where
artist from different disciplines and walks of life can truly thrive. Faire in
French means make. That’s exactly what I got to do during these
unencumbered two weeks.
Studio Faire offers a diverse range of studio spaces. My live-in studio was called “The Garden View Room.” It was just as the name suggests. A double bedroom that situates at the back of the house with a view over the garden through two large windows. Every morning, the light would pour in from the south-facing garden. I made good use of this space cultivating it as my own. Julia even provided me with a sizeable corkboard where I would pin clustered mind maps for poem ideas and memos for daily writing goals.
As this residency is a self-directed program, what you want to accomplish during your time is solely up to you and the other residents. The best thing I got out of this residency was devising a routine for writing during my stay. A typical day consisted of a morning of revising draft poems, organizing my current chapbook manuscript, and generating new ideas.
There was an armchair in the corner of my room where I sat down to read from passages of random artbooks every morning before I got to writing. Julia and Colin happen to have a small bookcase outside my room. During my stay, I dubbed it the “wee bookshelf” for my Scottish hosts. Combing through the spines of novels, artbooks, and poetry collection, I serendipitously came across a back issue of Room magazine. It seemed a piece of Vancouver found me. Or perhaps I found it?
I’d also changed up my routine by writing in the garden in the backyard. There was so much botanical life sprawling in this garden that made me feel so blissful. It was a good meditative spot to go unwind or if I needed a solitary place in nature to rethink an idea or reapproach my writing methodology. One morning I was fortunate enough to get a photo of a tree branch shadow reflected across my laptop screen.
Time truly felt like it was own. I was able to immerse myself in my writing, while exploring this hidden gem of a town. After I wrote in the morning, I’d go out and about in the afternoon to venture off into Nérac. The most impressive feat of this small town would be the omnipresent character of the long river called the Baïse. It felt like this river followed me wherever I wandered. It sourced through the commune like a pulse. In that moment, embracing the grandeur of where I was, I allowed myself the permission to abandon everything else and just simply exist for my writing.
I relished in my thought-provoking discussions with my fellow resident, Rob Kitsos. Rob was a dance artist who came to Studio Faire to work on his choreographic research on materials and space, Moving Matter. Coincidentally, Rob also hails form Vancouver.
Other than updating each other on the progressions of our
projects, we discussed our mutual love with geometric linguistics, ekphrasis
methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration within the arts. I enjoyed
our evening wanderings through town. On one such occasion, we got lost on the
way, enamoured by the iridescence of the town at twilight.
At end of our two weeks as a thank you to Julia and Colin, Rob and I decided to perform and present on the work we did during our productive time at Studio Faire. I read ekphrasis poems from my collaboration in progress with botanical artist, Katrina Vera Wong, Frankenflora Morphologues. Rob presented on his research in the form of his choregraphed video he had created in response to the spatiality of Studio Faire. His presentation also included an oral recitation of a found poem I wrote in response to Rob’s ekphrasis methodology of material and space. For the performance, we used the Garage Studio (Rob’s studio) as the venue.
It was a good venue for our performance as we were both using visuals and audio. As Rob says about the Garage, “It’s a room with tons of history and mystique. It’s a great raw space.”
All in all, Studio Faire is an amazing experience that allows you to curate a residency experience towards your needs and wants. For me that was balancing my own creative practice, wanderlust, and collaborating ideas with the like-minded individuals who I shared a home with. I was humbled to be accepted as the first 2024 Poet-in-Residence. I hope to return one day. I know there are exciting developments happening at Studio Faire and I can’t wait to watch its growth as an arts and culture space.
Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, poetic dictation, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively.