How Colivings Can Commission Artists for Paid Creative Programmes.
A coliving can commission useful creative work without turning artists into free entertainment for residents. The brief, fee, access, and outcome need to be clear from the beginning.
A coliving does not need another evening activity that asks an artist to perform their personality for residents. It needs to decide what it wants the work to do and pay the artist for doing it.
That could mean a mural, a workshop, a temporary installation, a local cultural route, a publication, a listening session, a dinner, a piece of furniture, or a programme that helps residents understand the place they have arrived in. The format is secondary to the brief.
Start with the building and the place
A good commission begins with what the coliving actually is. Is it a home for people staying between cities? A long-term community? A place with a courtyard, roof, kitchen, workshop, library, event room, or difficult-to-use public edge? Does it sit inside a neighbourhood that residents rarely leave because nobody has given them a useful route out?
Those details give an artist something real to respond to. They also stop the programme from becoming a generic request for a colourful wall or an inspirational event.
Pay for the work, not only the materials
A commission budget needs to include the artist’s time, research, preparation, production, materials, travel, access requirements, installation, and any usage rights the coliving wants to retain. The fee should not be hidden inside a materials allowance.
If the artist is expected to host a public session, that is another piece of labour. If the coliving wants photographs, ongoing use of the work, or a repeat programme, those terms should be discussed rather than quietly assumed.
Make the resident experience part of the brief
The residents are not a replacement for a budget. They can be part of the context, the research, or the encounter, but the artist should not be asked to extract a programme from unpaid participation and call that an exchange.
The useful question is what residents can genuinely contribute and what the coliving is responsible for providing. The artist brings a practice. The operator brings a place, access, production support, and a fee.
A route to the right artist
The hard part is often not deciding that a programme should exist. It is finding the artist whose work can hold the building without being flattened by it. Countercult’s curated network gives colivings a starting point for that search, with public profiles, places, practices, and local context rather than a random list of names.
Countercult Studios can then help shape the brief, identify the right fit, manage the production, and make sure the relationship ends with a real outcome rather than a loose promise to collaborate later.
A paid creative programme gives a coliving more than atmosphere. It gives the building a way to become part of the cultural life around it without pretending to own that life.
Have a place, tourism, or cultural-development brief?
Countercult Studios works as a contractor or specialist delivery partner on research, mapping, cultural strategy, campaigns, experiences, commissions, archives, and production.
An original Countercult field note for coliving operators considering paid artist commissions, cultural programming, and responsible local engagement.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.