Imagined as a residency that would result in no material production, the Site Residency was conceptually grounded in theories and practices of withdrawal and in the critical questioning of creation, materiality, and objectified artistic output, paying tribute to the artistic strategies from the 1960s and ’70s. This publication presents various visual and textual materials of the residency’s three participating artists.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”