Connecting Over Coffee: The Artist Residency - Part One The Wall

Part One

THE WALL

Three months. One building. And the longest eleven feet in Europe.

"The first casualty of war is not truth.

It is the ability to see the enemy as a person."

— Adapted from Aeschylus

Month One

The smell of coffee reaches Studio 7 before Oksana does.

She notices it the moment the elevator opens. It moves down the hallway, warm and faintly smoky, and she thinks: someone is already here. Someone is already making this place feel like a place.

Oksana Kovalenko is thirty-four years old. She is a sculptor from Kyiv. She works in steel and found wood, and when she is in her element, her hands know what to do before her head does. She flew in from Warsaw this morning. She was awake at four. She is carrying everything she owns in two bags. She has not slept properly in six months. None of that matters right now. She is here.

Casa das Artes, a Lisbon arts residency offering six months on a full scholarship.

She earned this.

She rolls her suitcase down the corridor and reads the name plates. Studio 1: Johnny Haas, Canada. Studio 2: Genevieve Bourque, USA. Studio 3: Benedita Ferrentina, Portugal. Studio 4: Yusuf Abubakar, Nigeria. Studio 5: Camila Rocha, Brazil.

She stops at Studio 6.

M. VOLKOV. RUSSIA.

She reads it twice. Her hand is still on the suitcase handle. She does not move. The coffee smell is still there, patient and warm, but she cannot feel it anymore. She stands in that corridor for a full minute. Then she picks up her bag, goes into Studio 7, and closes the door.

She sits on the edge of the bare mattress. Блядь,(Blyad' - f..k) she thinks. Is there no peace left in this world.

She does not unpack. She stares at the wall between her studio and Studio 6 and does not think about anything in particular for a very long time.

* * *

Sofia Andrade has been director of Casa das Artes for eleven years. She is a compact woman in her fifties with silver-streaked hair and the kind of patience that comes from running a building full of artists who all believe their work is the most important thing happening in any given room.

Every morning, before anyone else arrives, she brews coffee in the small kitchen beside her office. It is a coffee ritual she has kept for eleven years. The smell travels. It moves down the main corridor and into the side halls. It slides under studio doors and reaches artists still sleeping, still staring at canvases, still lying awake thinking about home. It is not a statement. It is just what she does. She makes coffee. She opens the building. She tends. She makes human connection possible before anyone arrives to ask for it.

Each evening she carries the same things to each studio door. A French press loaded with fresh ground coffee, two ceramic cups and a small silver thermos of hot water, worn the way a tool gets worn, dented at the base, the silver gone to a deep grey along the grip, the surface mapped with the faint impressions of every hand that held it over eleven years. It looks like something a farmer would carry in from a long day in the field. It works every time.

She sets all of it on the floor outside every studio, every night, without exception. Not just some. All of them. Nobody asked her to start. Nobody asks her to stop. The French press, two cups and thermos at your door mean the day is done and the morning is coming, and in this building at least, someone is keeping count.

She was the one who accepted Mikhail Volkov's application. She was also the one who accepted Oksana Kovalenko's. She read both files in the same week in January 2022. She saw the names. She understood what she was doing. She did it anyway.

Eduardo Fonseca lit up when she told him. Eduardo is a tall man with very white teeth and a talent for framing things as opportunities. "Two artists," he said. "From both sides. Same building, Sofia. That is a story." Sofia looked at him for a moment. Then she said: "It is twelve people trying to make art. That is all it is."

Eduardo smiled the way people smile when they disagree but have decided to wait.

* * *

Mikhail Volkov arrives two days after Oksana.

He is forty-one. He paints in oils. Large canvases, architectural subjects mostly. Buildings lived in hard. Stairwells. Courtyards. Walls with the memory of old paint showing through new. He has shown in Moscow and Berlin and once in Prague, and he has spent the last eight months telling himself that the acceptance letter from Casa das Artes was the best thing that could have happened.

His mother cried when he told her. His brother went quiet in a way that meant something specific. They were three weeks into what the news at home called the special military operation, and the army had registered Mikhail. The letter from Lisbon arrived nine days before his reporting date. He took it. He packed his oils and his largest brushes and three linen shirts, and he got on a plane.

Before he left, his mother held his face in her hands and said: "You will come back. When it is done, you will come back and serve. Promise me." He said: "I promise." He did not know, standing in his mother's kitchen with the cab waiting outside, whether he was lying.

He tells himself he is here to paint. That is the only sentence he has prepared for anyone who asks.

He finds Studio 6 without trouble. He reads the name plate on Studio 7. O. KOVALENKO. UKRAINE. He reads it once. He goes inside and closes his door. He sits on his bed and thinks about what his brother told him before he left: the operation will be over in weeks. The Ukrainians have been waiting for this. You will see.

He made himself believe it all the way to Lisbon. He is still making himself believe it now, though it is harder than it was.

* * *

The residency has three phases.

Sofia explains this at the first meeting. The first three months, each artist works in their own medium. The next two months, they take on something new. In the final month, they return to their practice to produce the work they will show at the closing exhibit. The structure is intentional. The unfamiliar medium is not a detour. It is the point.

"You will surprise yourselves," Sofia says. "In the best way and sometimes in the worst way. Both are useful."

Eduardo is also at the table. He talks about the calibre of the program and the international attention the residency receives and the collectors who will attend the closing showcase. He talks for eleven minutes. Sofia drinks her coffee.

Oksana sits at one end of the table.

Mikhail sits at the other.

The ten artists between them talk about their work. They are warm people who ask each other questions and laugh easily. A Brazilian ceramicist named Camila makes a joke about the coffee being better than her ex-husband, and the table erupts. Genevieve from the United States says the coffee is better than her current husband too, and the table erupts again.

Oksana laughs. She does not look down the table.

Mikhail smiles. He does not look up.

Sofia watches both of them.

* * *

The corridor between Studio 6 and Studio 7 is eleven feet long and four feet wide. There is a shared bathroom at one end and a small window at the other that looks out over the Tagus. In the mornings, the light comes through the window at a low angle and sits on the floor in a long rectangle.

For the first month, neither Mikhail nor Oksana walks through that light at the same time.

They build a system without ever discussing it. Oksana is up by six-fifteen. She is in the bathroom and back in her studio with the door closed by six-forty. She works until noon, goes out for lunch, returns by two, works until eight. She does not go to the kitchen when she hears Mikhail's door open.

Mikhail stays in his studio until nine. He takes long showers. He works until late afternoon and then walks along the river. He does not go to the kitchen when Oksana's light is visible under her door.

The system works. They never see each other.

The other artists notice. Camila says something to Yusuf one evening over wine in the courtyard. Yusuf says: "Leave it. They are working something out." Camila says: "They are not working anything out. They are not speaking." Yusuf says: "Yes. They are working something out."

* * *

Three weeks in, Oksana calls her sister.

Daryna is thirty years old and lives in Kharkiv. She is a teacher. She has been in the same apartment since February, and she sounds every night like a person who has been told to be brave so many times the word has stopped meaning anything.

"How is it?" Daryna asks.

"Good," Oksana says.

"Are you working?"

"Yes."

"Are you eating?"

"Yes."

This is how they talk now. Daryna asks questions Oksana can answer in one word. Oksana does not ask questions that would require more than one word from Daryna. It is a kindness they built without naming it.

"There is a Russian here," Oksana says. She does not know why she says it.

Silence.

"Next door," Oksana says.

More silence. Then Daryna says: "Is he bothering you?"

"No. He does not say anything."

"Good," Daryna says, and her voice drops. "Let him say nothing. He can take his silence back with him when this is over."

Oksana sits with the phone after they hang up and looks at the wall. She can hear something on the other side of it. A brush, probably. The dry scrape of bristles on canvas. She gets up and puts on music so she does not have to hear it.

* * *

At the second biweekly meeting, Benedita mentions the news. She has family in Porto who have taken in two Ukrainian families, a grandmother and her grandchildren, a mother with a newborn. Several artists nod. Camila reaches across the table and takes Oksana's hand.

Oksana does not cry. She holds very still.

Mikhail looks at his coffee cup.

Nobody asks him anything. They have all been polite. They are still polite. Mikhail has started to notice that polite can hold a very sharp edge.

After the meeting, he finds Johnny Haas in the kitchen.

Johnny is thirty-seven, a painter from Vancouver who works in large-format photorealism. He has a direct manner and a slow smile and he does not seem to need much from people. Mikhail finds him easy to be around. They have been talking, in the way two painters talk, about process and material and the specific frustration of the large canvas.

"Hard meeting," Johnny says.

"Yes," Mikhail says.

Johnny pours two cups from the kitchen machine and hands one over. They stand at the counter and drink. Johnny does not say anything else. Mikhail is glad of it.

Month Two

Four weeks in, Mikhail stops painting.

This happens sometimes. He knows it is not permanent. He has been through it before and learned that the worst thing you can do is push against it. The second worst thing is to stop going to the studio. So he goes. He sits in front of a blank canvas. He pours water from the thermos Sofia left at his door the night before, runs it through his small kettle, and drinks his coffee and stares at the white and waits.

He is sitting like this on a Tuesday morning when he hears Oksana crying.

Not sobbing. Not loudly. The kind of crying a person does when they are trying not to. Short, controlled, barely audible. He only hears it because the walls are not as thick as they look.

He sits very still.

His first thought is not sympathy. It is something more complicated than that, something he does not examine too closely. She is Ukrainian. He knows what she carries. He also knows what they told him about why this happened, what made it necessary. He sits with those two things and they do not fit together in any clean way.

He picks up a brush.

He does not plan what he paints. He just starts. The canvas is large, one meter sixty by one meter twenty, and he uses it all. He does not paint the corridor. He is not thinking about the corridor. He is painting something he has been turning away from for weeks: a figure. Female. Standing in a space that is not quite a room and not quite a ruin. Around her, the lines of something broken. A fractured shape at the center that he does not name, even to himself.

He paints for six hours without stopping.

He does not know if it is good. He knows it is the first true thing he has made in four weeks. He stands back and looks at it. He does not know what he is trying to say. He knows he is trying to say something.

Month Three

The third biweekly meeting is the hardest one so far.

Eduardo Fonseca arrives with news that a collector from London has expressed specific interest in work responding to current events. He says current events with the careful voice of a man who has learned that some phrases are safer than others. Everyone in the room understands what he means.

Camila speaks first. She says that art made in response to injustice has a long and honourable tradition. She is looking at Eduardo when she says it. Then she looks at Oksana.

Yusuf says art should not have to carry the weight of politics.

Genevieve says all art already carries that weight whether we admit it or not.

A painter from South Korea named Ji-ho, who has said very little at any meeting until now, says that the difference between a political act and a human act is smaller than most people like to think.

Nobody asks Mikhail what he thinks.

He sits at his end of the table and holds his cup and does not look at Oksana. She sits at her end and holds her cup and does not look at him. The table between them is very long.

After the meeting, Sofia stays behind to stack chairs. When the room is empty she stands at the window for a moment with her coffee and looks out at the Tagus.

She is not sure eleven feet is going to be enough. She is not sure it ever was.

* * *

On a Tuesday evening in the last week of month three, Mikhail is in his studio hanging a large canvas. The ladder is tall. He has used it for weeks without incident. He climbs to the top rung with the canvas under one arm and his hammer in the other. He reaches for the hook. The ladder shifts. He grabs for the wall and misses.

He goes down hard, the full height of it, and hits the floor with a sound that travels straight through the wall.

Oksana is at her workbench. She hears it. She puts down her tool and stands up. She does not move for a full three seconds.

She knows whose studio it came from.

Three seconds. That is how long it takes her. Three seconds of standing at her workbench with her tool on the table and the sound still reverberating in the wall, and she thinks: he is Russian. He is from the country that is destroying her city and killing her people and has put her sister inside an apartment in Kharkiv from which she may not emerge. Three full seconds.

Then she opens the door.

* * *

The canvas is face-out against the wall where it slid when he fell.

Oksana does not look at it right away. She lifts the ladder off Mikhail first, sets it against the wall, and checks his head. The cut above his left ear is bleeding hard. She goes to the bathroom, finds a cloth, brings it back. He takes it from her. She pulls the desk chair over and sits and watches him take inventory of his own body the way a person does when they have to decide if things are broken.

She sees the canvas when she stands to check the bathroom for antiseptic.

She stops.

It is large and layered, dark at the edges, still wet in places. A shape at the center, vaguely human, vaguely female, standing or perhaps falling. Around her, geometric lines, broken lines. Things that might be walls. Things that might be headstones. A shape at the center of the figure that splits, clean down the middle, like a heart divided or a country divided. She cannot tell which.

She does not know if she is reading it correctly. She does not know if she wants to.

What she knows is that whoever made it has talent. Real talent. The kind that does not need you to like it.

She sets the canvas carefully against the wall, face-out, and goes back to Mikhail.

"The canvas," he says. It is the first complete sentence he has said to her.

"It is not damaged," she says.

He looks at it from the floor. He breathes out.

She does not ask him what it is. She does not offer anything more than what was needed. She stands, looks at him one last time, and goes back to Studio 7.

She closes the door. She stands with her back against it for a moment.

Then she picks up her tools and goes back to work.

 

— End of Part One —

 

In the corridor, Sofia's French press and the old silver thermos are already waiting outside each studio door. Two cups. The thermos still hot. Tomorrow is a new month.