Cecilia Wendt
Past Artist In Residence
2001

Cecilia Wendt is a Swedish installation artist, who in 2001 came with her group, N55, to Los Angeles to work as artists-in-residence at 18th Street.  While here, the group work on their installation called LAND, which was built in an effort to discuss the meaning of ownership of and access to land. LAND is constructed from pieces of land from different places in the world. The various parts are added to LAND by persons who guarantee that anybody can stay in LAND and use it. The purpose of LAND is that any individual is entitled to and is allowed to use the installation. The manual for LAND states, “Attention is directed to the logical relation between persons and the rights of persons. Persons should be treated as persons and therefore as having rights. If we deny this assertion it goes wrong: here is a person, but this person should not be treated as a person, or: here is a person, who should be treated as a person, but not as having rights. Therefore we can only talk about persons in a way that makes sense if we know that persons have rights.” Wendt is no longer part of the group N55 but rather she is part of the international group called Learning Site. This group of artists are interested in engaging with and paying attention to local situations (wherever they may find themselves) and developing art projects which are learning platforms and demonstrations about the economic, political and social structures of unused materials, recycled waste or conditions of production in societies. As their name suggests, Learning Site understands art as being related to forms of knowledge production and thus also to dialogue and learning.