Even as majālis and halafāts were developing as loci of creative and collaborative encounters throughout the Arab lands, another space of artistic creation was arising in Europe. This is none other than the studio. In Time and Space to Create and to Be Human. A Brief Chronotope of Residencies (2019), Pascal Gielen describes the studio as

'[a] sheltered space of highest concentration, focus, quiet, contemplation, and being intimate with oneself. In the studio, the artist is completely in control, still experiencing the romantic illusion of artistic autonomy at its best. Studio time is therefore personal ‘own-time’ and studio space the ‘own-space’ (...) No words are uttered in the studio, at most some incomprehensible muttering and mumbling, alternated by an exuberantly joyful cry as something finally seems to be working out.'

The studio model first emerged in the 17th century in northern Europe. Wishing to escape from the constraints of religious guidance, private individuals imposed themselves as arbiters of taste and patrons of the arts. In doing so, the nascent industrious bourgeoisie supplanted the centralised infrastructure of the Church, which had dominated the production of art in the European Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the break with religious tradition was not as obvious as it could be: as Brian O’Doherty has argued,

'the purpose of the studio was not unlike that of the religious buildings. The artworks, like religious verities, had to appear untouched by time and its vicissitudes.'

In line with the sacralised conception of the artwork, another aspect remained untouched: seclusion continued to be a necessary precondition for the novel studio practice. Indeed, the history of the studio as a chamber of eternal creation and display can be inscribed not only in the history of art but also in the history of religion. Similarly to the work of scholars and pious men, the practice of studio art is also geared towards the attainment of  a higher metaphysical realm. As such, the studio space had to be sheltered from time and the appearance of change. The studio thus became a reflexive space, with the act of contemplation becoming incorporated into the creative process. Indeed, important developments in oil painting techniques allowed for the careful and hyper-realistic depiction of everyday objects over a slow, drawn-out process of mixing, layering and drying. This process required patience and dedication, silence and careful contemplation, the painting becoming in itself, an object of cult, a

'slender and reduced form of life required also in religious Sanctuaries.'

It was in these secluded spaces that a new form of framing the individual act of creation and the production of aesthetic knowledge slowly arose. It was also there that the high culture of Modernity became subject to the universalising regime of formalism as a system of reading. The self-fashioning of the artist as genius, together with the growing penchant for formalism, altered the status of the artwork profoundly. Indeed, while it continued to be seen as a privileged commodity fetish and an object of connoisseurship, it was gradually reduced to its physical qualities and so reframed in semantic poverty.

Although the emergence of the studio as a space of isolated artistic production is considered a breakthrough in Western art history, and is even seen in many narratives as the origin of contemporary art practices, the history that follows is by no means straightforward.

︎︎︎Even though the Romantic idea of the artist has significantly eroded, the studio continues to function as a hermit-like space. It is no coincidence that quite a number of art residencies are located in the middle of nowhere, far from all urban confusion, away not only from the professional art world, but from the world itself. In this way, they can be seen to replicate the studio episteme.

Indeed, since the turn of the 20th century and the emergence of the avant-gardes, the studio has undergone a series of crises. As artists have come to embrace installation art, performance, relational aesthetics and other site-specific approaches that necessarily occur outside of the studio, this site of solitary creativity and material exploration has become a social space. In this context we are in need of posing the following question: What if the contemporary surge of networked, collaborative and socially engaged practices had more to do with those performed within majālis, coffee-houses and ḥafalāts rather than with a natural evolution of the studio space? If we look at the history of such practices not as a linear path but as an interconnected organism, free of temporal or spatial boundaries, could we consider majālis, coffee-houses and ḥafalāts as part of a pre- and the post-studio condition? Such a proposition would bring into focus the spaces of gathering and encounter that ground artistic creation. It would bring us to contemplate the possibility of tracing an alternative genealogy, one that does not excessively focus on the production of art objects but rather pays attention to the practice of the journey as a search for knowledge. What if the experimental modes proposed from within the contemporary art residency models had more to do with the need to gather around a table at a coffee-house in 17th - century Cairo than with a sojourn at the studios of the elitist French Academy in Rome? What if the collaborative task of Islamic men of letters gathered around the fire translating and discussing texts on cosmology, geography and mysticism as part of a week-long ḥafalāt was also taken into account when tracing other histories of the art residency? And, moving a step further, what if, as Wendy M.K. Shaw has proposed in her writings on Islamic art history, we rethink the genealogy of art residencies by placing not artistic production but the heart at the centre? Too often, within the art residency field, it is the I who speaks, not the we. As Pascal Gielen has noted,

it is within this I, self-enclosed in the confines of the studio, that 'the endless ambition of the artists continues to flourish.'

Thinking about the strategies of creation and exchange in medieval and modern Arab territories through the majālis, coffee-houses and ḥafalāts may indeed open new avenues to understanding the creative act — not so much as an individual, isolated practice, but as a collaborative and trans-disciplinary endeavour.