Modeling Home: A Call for New Approaches to Art and Research Residencies

Aerial view of A-Z West, Joshua Tree, California. Image courtesy of High Desert Test Sites. Photo: Josh Cho.

“These ants made their way inside again?!” I exclaim to myself, exasperated, wiping out lives with a damp rag while in residence at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House. I’m here for a project on cohabitation, mapping the connections and compromises necessary for human and more-than-human livability in Los Angeles. Naturally, my attention is drawn to the living in this living space, and the invasive ants represent only a few of my housemates. The title of my residency project is Hospes, the Latin root for multiple English words including, paradoxically, both ‘host’ and ‘guest’. Carrying dual meaning, hospes is a linguistic trick, a reminder that hosting and guesting are never binary. Those who are guests must on other occasions serve as hosts, and vice versa. The word hospes makes visible the fluid dynamics of reciprocal responsibility, all are active participants in creating conditions of home and well-being. My residency, itself hosted by the MAK Center and SOM Foundation, is grounded in questions such as: “What is required of good guests and hosts in order to cultivate just habitability?”

So far, I have shared this space with centipedes, a house spider who lives in the original jade green bathtub, a giant silverfish, and several daddy long-legs who lounge in tall corners. At least three crane flies have made themselves at home upstairs. Out of the house’s swimming pool, I scoop three or four honeybees a day. Most are still alive, hanging on in some energy-saving mode, but at least five have died, not counting those who surely float into the pool filter unnoticed. Other survivors have included the iridescent jewel that is the native ultra-green sweat bee, butterflies, moths, and beetles. What does it mean to be in residence alongside so many others who already reside?

“Residence” is a sticky orienting principle in this proto-white box of glass and concrete which was never intended to be inhabited at all. Built in 1936, in the biodiversity hotspot that is Laurel Canyon, the Fitzpatrick-Leland House was commissioned by developer Clifton Fitzpatrick as a speculative home. It was then designed by R.M. Schindler, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, as a gleaming lure with which to entice speculators and spectators to these Hollywood Hills.¹ Eventually, what began as a model went through cycles of remodeling, inhabitation, and de-modeling through the mechanism of exponentially appreciating real estate. In the 1990s, it was restored to its original condition by architectural designer Russ Leland, who donated it to the MAK Center, and it has since served as an exhibition and residency space for artists such as Florian Hecker and Kim Gordon.

In predictable Wright protégé fashion, the house consistently negotiates the boundaries of inside and outside. Large windows open directly into tall beds of ferns that collapse indoors. Leaf litter and eucalyptus bark blow in from the west along the ocean breeze, as does smog from Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon Boulevard just below. The shower opens out to the surrounding hills, where every night in June a pack of baby coyotes can be heard rehearsing their serenades. Often, they sing in the round with passing sirens, a territorial call-and-response. As the weeks go by, a Dark-eyed junco and Western fence lizard have each made home visits through the windows.

Though I’m intimately familiar with L.A.’s living landscapes, the act of “guesting” in this specific architecture, where the built and unbuilt environment have been made deliberately permeable, offers emergent perspectives. The frequent multispecies encounters of the porous house bring the concept of residency itself, with all its questions of shared stewardship, into focus. With origins as a speculative home, perhaps the Fitzpatrick-Leland House is now poised to function as a space for imagining what new models of residence could look like.

The Fitzpatrick-Leland House (2022). Image courtesy of MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Photo: Tag Christof / MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Interior of the Fitzpatrick-Leland House during a research residency (2024–25). Photo: Maya Livio.

Art and research residencies in the U.S. today are rooted in long-standing lineages, from the informal artist colonies of New Mexico in the 1880s to Black Mountain College in the 1930s. But as cultural producer Irmeli Kokko reminds us, the structure and priorities of residencies have shifted over time, often in response to fluctuations in creative practices.² Residencies of the 1970s and ’80s, for example, figured the studio as a private workspace, a protected isolation zone shielding artists and researchers from the outside world. According to curator Miwon Kwon, creative practitioners increasingly centered their work on travel during the broader turn towards globalization of the 1990s, and the number of residencies worldwide subsequently multiplied.[ 3. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).] Those residencies became more outward-facing, no longer intended to insulate artists but instead to entwine them with peers, communities, and publics.

Illustrating this development is the Guide of Host Facilities for Artists on Short-Term Stay in the World, the first international residency catalogue, published in 1995. To be eligible for inclusion, residencies were not only required to provide artists and researchers with workspace but also to embed them in place and to network them with “new contacts.”³ The creative works made in residence during this period became more thoroughly bound together with the locations and communities of their making. As a result, site-specificity was cemented as a residency priority, one which often continues today. In recent years, that site-specificity has noticeably extended further, beyond the walls of the studio and into the land, with an increasing number of residencies asking visitors to connect with environmental place in their work. Potential residents are commonly asked to identify what draws them to the residency site in particular, or which of the residency’s spaces, tools, or communities would be useful to their practice. Today, land itself may also be offered up as potential “resource.”

This shift, from the residency as isolated and private to site- and land-specific, raises critical and ongoing questions about the colonial logics through which artists may “[parachute] in to suck up place:”⁴ If a resident has not spent time on this land or with this community before, are they capable of making meaningful interventions there? Is it possible for residents to make adequately responsive work without sustained and embodied relation-building? Site-specific residencies risk treating land and its inhabitants as mineable for cultural value. This extractive mode places host and guest in a hierarchical and antagonistic relationship, illustrating how nuanced and complicated the host/ guest coupling can be.

It also makes explicit the need for alternative models. For example, centering relations within a residency’s ecosystemic neighborhoods has become more pressing alongside accelerating environmental change. In Southern California in particular, which sits at the edge of the climate crisis and is built atop layered histories of extraction, residencies have become more environmentally vulnerable. This was brought into sharp relief during the January 2025 wildfires, when multiple residency spaces around the city were threatened or damaged, leaving institutions and residents from near and far to navigate increased volatility. The Villa Aurora residency, which houses artists and journalists from Germany, was damaged by the Palisades Fire,⁵ a warning regarding the changing tensions of welcoming international guests to the coastal sage and chaparral. The Residency Project, which supports visiting artists with housing in Pasadena, was similarly near enough to the Eaton fire to sustain ash, smoke, and wind damage.⁶ As environmental catastrophe continues to threaten both residents and treasured cultural institutions, what could new and adaptive residency models look like, ones that co-support human and nonhuman thriving in the face of rapid change?

Residencies are already well- equipped to evolve in response to mutating needs, as they have always been in flux alongside shifting creative practices. Much like host/guest relations, residencies flourish when they allow for continual transformation in response to internal and external environments.

By July, the Fitzpatrick-Leland’s pool edges are dotted with dead insects. I now scoop four or five lifeless bodies a day, including a native yellow-faced bumblebee. Many still survive but enough die to make it uncomfortable. One morning, I find a mouse swimming laps. Thirst is presumably what drives these risky behaviors, everyone is a little more parched. The small patch of undeveloped canyon land across the street has dried up too and I occasionally see volunteers managing dry vegetation there for fire mitigation. It is an intervention that hints at opportunities for Southern California residencies to lead a new wave of residency adaptation, particularly given their situatedness at the front lines of environmental vulnerability.

Nora Rolf and Wendy Roberts in the A–Z West weaving studio at High Desert Test Sites. Image courtesy of High Desert Test Sites. Photo: Anne Müchler and Nico Schmitz.

Ava DeCapri during a Work-Trade Residency at A–Z West / High Desert Test Sites. Image courtesy of High Desert Test Sites. Photo: Anne Müchler and Nico Schmitz.

Several local residencies are already experimenting with methods and infrastructures that resonate with hospes. For example, A-Z West in Joshua Tree, founded by artist Andrea Zittel and now stewarded by High Desert Test Sites, has embedded environmentality into its processes and systems. The site relies on solar power and residents are asked to turn off studio lights by 9 pm to reduce light pollution. The gleaming silver water tank of the main house is located directly outside of the shower window, where it seems to sit as a reminder of scarcity. Sparkling in the desert sun, it focuses host and guest attention on water usage. The majority of residents at A-Z West come in through the work-trade program, which offers lodging and studio access in exchange for the labor of maintaining the site of residence—tending compost, cleaning, feeding rescue tortoises, and crafting A-Z West Works Containers in the ceramics studio.

These trade-based and sustainable practices blur the boundaries of host and guest, making residents an active part of the residency structure and engaging them in what is already ongoing.

In Los Angeles, the emerging residency project Extraterracetrill offers another salient example of how residency protocols can be refigured. Currently in development by artist Huntrezz Janos, the site already welcomes Janos’ own artist community as guests when visiting from elsewhere or seeking a gathering place. Once fully operational, it will also host programming. Extraterracetrill functions off-grid and features regenerative agricultural practices and water reclamation. It is partially built of earth- bags, a sustainable building material. Moreover, Janos’ vision includes a novel approach that treats residency spaces as “public-private gradient,” allowing unhoused locals to use portions of the area in addition to visiting artists. In this way, the hierarchy of host and guest is destabilized, signaling the changing dynamics (and expanding the types of support) a residency can offer to local communities, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Earthbag terrace construction at ExtraTerraceTrill residency in Los Angeles (2025). Photo: Huntrezz Janos.

If residencies were once conceived of as protecting artists and researchers from the outside world, then as encouraging engagement with that world as visitors, they now necessitate more reciprocal, responsible, and humble co-participation in place, with local expertise as guide. While residents from afar are always at risk of perpetuating exploitative logics, their position as guests also offers an oblique perspective for noticing details and kinships anew. Residencies have an opportunity, then, to demonstrate the potential for hospes as a guiding principle, one that can function not as a restrictive framework but as generative provocation towards less extractive modes of relation.

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As I close out my time at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House, I assemble a list of recommendations for more convivial forms of residence there, which my hosts warmly welcome: A resident communication channel for distributing leftover food and supplies to reduce waste, for instance, and a bee fountain and small ramp to help drowning animals. The coyotes have quieted down and blue dasher dragonflies have started to keep me company in the pool. Sometimes they dive over me to kiss the water.

Maya Livio works at the interfaces of ecosystems and technological systems. She is an assistant professor of environmental media at American University and holds a PhD from the University of Colorado and MA from the University of Amsterdam. She is a resident of the California coastal sage & chaparral and Chesapeake rolling coastal plain ecoregions.

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