There are a lot of elements that make the AKI AORA residency a truly special experience, but the one that felt the most valuable to me was how we treated time. I enjoy working with the quick pace of the arts sector, but it means that taking time - really fully taking it without the limit of a looming deadline, a set outcome, an expected respo2 dnse - is a very rare luxury that we may even forget we should long for. Creating a space that allows for gathering and conversation, that at the same time is somehow lifted out of the normal pace of cultural work, where exchanges are driven by curiosity to learn about another’s practice rather than a desire to formalize something right then and there, makes you sit with it - whatever it may be: an idea, questions, reflections on current past and future projects or just a hint of a feeling for something that had not yet fully presented itself. This practice of sitting with it, of letting something linger, to allow something to be present without immediately dissecting it, I believe, is the best thing to think better, bigger, or maybe differently. A sort of calm and natural confrontation with thinking within this community is a different sort of labour that brings with it a longevity of connection and ideas that has a solid feeling to it. Thank you for having me.

- Charlotte Knaup