Clarity, confidence and creative entrepreneurship: a conversation with independent artist Tatiana Rosa

Tatiana Rosa is an audiovisual artist based in Amsterdam. Trained as a classical flautist, she has spent years expanding her practice into electronic music, visuals, VR and installation work, becoming, as she puts it herself, something of an octopus. When she began working with Tò Mò, she was midway through an AFK development grant: a period set aside not for producing new work, but for reflection, positioning and growth. It turned out to be exactly the right moment to explore the Curio Model, a model designed by Tò Mò to help artists and organisations balance sustainable entrepreneurship with artistic freedom. The Curio Model is a grid with four squares on which you plot your work. It maps the balance between financial and creative freedom.

As almost always happens in our sessions, Tatiana first came to us with one question and by the end, the coaching ended up being about much more, she explains. “One of the initial concerns was my positioning in the field. I do so many different things that it’s sometimes very hard to place myself in the field and say: this is me. I wanted to strengthen my artistic signature, especially in the world of fine and visual arts, where I was mostly still perceived as a musician or composer.”

“Through the process a concern that came up was the balance between paid projects, non-paid projects, projects that give artistic freedom and projects that don’t, and how to balance that. Just before the period with the AFK development grant I was actually very, very busy, but not the good kind of busy. I was doing okay financially, but if I put it in perspective, the amount of work versus the amount of money, it was definitely not sustainable.”

Finding the balance between creative and financial freedom is a struggle that Tatiana says many artists face. “So many artists have side jobs, like teaching, to help make that balance sustainable so that they can also still have artistic freedom. Because of course you can do a lot of paid jobs, but they sometimes give you no artistic reward whatsoever.”

“There’s this constant worry about paying the bills. Even if you’re doing good this year, what about next year? I come from a low-income family. So when I came to the Netherlands, I was also working side jobs, and this always had a big impact on me. So there was always the question of: how can I make this sustainable? Do I need to just take all the jobs, so that I know that I can keep on going? Of course somewhere deep down I saw that this was not the answer, because whenever I actually said no to something that was not giving me that freedom but was just giving me money, those were the moments that opportunities would arise. The workshops I did with Linda were like the culmination of this process. It helped me put it very clearly and put it into practice as well.”

“I think something else about the money situation is that it somehow relates to worth for artists. I think that’s a big difference between just running businesses and being an artist: if you have to apply for funding, if you do not have money, if people are not calling you for jobs and not paying you well enough, this also relates somehow to your personal worth. How do you detach from that notion that if you are not getting the money it’s because your art is shit, to put it very bluntly? That’s where it gets very personal.” 

This is also why the first session, a retrospective, can be confronting, especially as an independent artist. Tatiana: “It was the most difficult session of all of them. When you do a retrospective as an artist, it becomes really personal,  because you can’t easily separate the business side from your own experiences, fears and doubts. All of that comes to the surface. It was really good to do it with Linda because that made it safe and comfortable, but it was still scary, because you need to externalize all these doubts, all these things that are actually holding you back. And you need to do it in a way that’s very clear. Personally, I love Excel sheets, I love plans, so actually having this clarity and visualising it in such a simple way, like with the Curio Model, makes it somehow easier to address. It goes from being this big doubt hiding in the closet to being something that has a name and is just a little post-it on the whiteboard.”

Tatiana says she notices concrete changes since doing the sessions with Tò Mò: “A big change for me was that I am now only involved in projects that I feel give me something back. A project can do that in many ways, not just financial, of course, but I say ‘no’ a lot more. I thought this was going to burn a lot of bridges, but somehow it doesn’t. People actually really respect what I’m doing. That I’m not taking on anything that I can’t fully commit to either because of money or interest or whatever it may be. I’m very honest about that with people.”

“Another big change is that I still try to keep my love it and hate it columns up to date and have the hate completely empty”.

OK, that one might need a little explaining. Although the Curio Model was the baseline, we always tailor our frameworks to the individual. For Tatiana that was done by simplifying the model into two columns. She explains: “Like I said, I’m a visual person and I like clarity. So we made it very simple: two columns. One is love, one is hate, and there’s no gray areas. So either I love the project because it’s giving me great money, or I love it because it gives me no money, but a lot of reward in artistic freedom or whatever it may be, and anything else falls most likely in the hate column. Of course this has nothing to do with the actual emotion of hatred. It just means in this moment it’s not giving back enough.”

“When I had to write down all my projects on post-its, at first I had way too many post-its. It was problematic, even if I loved all of them. It was actually one of the reasons I think some of them ended up in the hate column, because I just didn’t have time to handle the projects at the time. That was also giving me a kind of anxiety. So yeah, now I try to keep all projects in the love column. Again, this isn’t an emotional distinction. You’re not going to love every second of every project, because of course you get stuck sometimes, or there’s an application you have to do, or something goes wrong. But overall if you zoom out, it has to be a ‘love’.

Another area where Tatiana says she has become a lot more mindful and selective is funding applications. “During one of the sessions the question was asked “What value can this institution bring to me?” I was like “Oh, I always felt like it’s the other way around!” It’s not only about what I can offer to a certain fund, because they actually need me as well. The funds need people applying for them. The residencies need applicants.”

“This shift was not immediate, it was more of a domino effect of working with the Curio model. Now that I look back on the applications that I’ve made and that I see other people making, I see that I became much more selective on where I apply to funding. Besides the money what can they provide? Who am I looking to work with? What are the audiences that I want to address? What is the impact that I want to have with my work? And in turn, what are they looking for? So it’s the question of being a good match with an institution or foundation or residency. I think that’s also the reason why I got some of the grants I got, because maybe they are a little bit under the radar or they are not as big, but I was very confident that there was a match when I applied.”

“Because of this, I don’t feel like I need to mold myself to the expectations of others. I can just be very much myself, because they are looking for a profile like me. I can scan through applications in a much quicker way. Even yesterday I was going through open calls and I saw what felt like a million great ones, even one in Japan. Now I can think “wow this is amazing but it’s not a match right now. Maybe in two years”. I no longer have that FOMO of having to take every good opportunity now. I guess you could say Tò Mò keeps away the FOMO!”

Another takeaway from the session that Tatiana says she goes back to a lot is setting different phases of goals. ”We determined a North Star, which is the biggest goal: this is what I want in my life, this would be the happiest place ever. And then we looked at where I am now and what are the mid-steps to get to that North Star. For me it’s to get a PhD and work more regularly with some sort of artistic research centre. I am very goal oriented, so before it was complicated sometimes. I would get frustrated if I couldn’t get to a goal immediately. Now, even if the things I’m doing don’t directly result in my end goal, I feel like I am on a path where all my decisions together add up to it and it doesn’t get side-tracked.

Tatiana doesn’t see the learnings from the sessions as a static thing. She adapts it in ways that suit her. “It’s an ongoing process. What we did in the sessions became embodied knowledge. That means the knowledge is always evolving with new situations and challenges. Currently I’m in one chapter, where the projects that I have now are all very, very sustainable in terms of income. I’m going to finish a full year of an artist residency with the European Union in November. Then I’m going to start a new chapter and will take the learnings from the past year with me.”

A note on funding: Tatiana’s coaching sessions with Tò Mò were made possible through her AFK development grant: a grant designed to give artists dedicated time for reflection and professional development, without the pressure of a project deliverable. A reminder that this kind of support exists, and that it can be used exactly like this.

To learn more about Tatiana’s work, check out her website!