Professional Patios, Emotional Studios: Locating Social Ties in European Art Residences

To foster creativity through sociality, residences put artists together. At the same time, in their quest for originality professional artists often opt for individualism. How is artistic sociality affected by physical co-location? Our paper draws on a combination of interviews, observations, and surveys, to capture how befriending and collaborating residents use spaces and objects. These data are analyzed with a mixture of abductive coding, computational space analysis, and statistical network modeling. Along with explicit individualism, we find plenty of social ties between the artists. These ties are positively related to joint physical embeddedness. Moreover, the two main types of spatial zones in residences – private working studio rooms and common leisure areas – appear to encourage the inverse types of social ties.