..on or around Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 04:17:10PM +0000, Damian Stewart said:
>
> hopefully you'll understand something from my ramble and will be able to
> give me some advice. any and all is appreciated.
[snip]
really you only have a handful of strategies. here is my ordering of
them:
1/ marry someone with an EU passport you both love and love living
with. as soon as the marriage is recognised in both countries you
have the right of residency. permanent citizenship is usually
automatically granted in 2-3 years.
2/ seek and get a great job relating to your practice and/or accept
a professorship at a UNI.
3/ buy time on working visas doing contract work while you find a
UNI position or job you do like.
4/ a mutually agreed upon 'passport marriage': marry someone you
believe you can stand living with for as long as it takes to get
citizenship status. in most cases this is 2-3 years. this is
not-reccommended, barely legal, and afflicted with a high failure
rate. nonetheless you'd be surprised how many people in the EU
would love to have a NZ passport.
5/ wing it. this, as you know, is a process of constantly trying to
improve your options. the first start involves a careful choice of
city.
most Kiwis hide in friendly cities like Berlin and pop out of the
Schengen states into a country like Switzerland to buy another 3
months stay-credit when they need to. that works very reliably:
while non-sensical it does work on paper - which is where it counts
in a queue at passport control. poor cities (like Berlin) are better
to these ends as they care only that you don't become an economic
burden. bring in money and they'll often let it go if you're from a
'western' country, preferably white and don't look totally broke.
Portugal, where you are, is a very good bet if you don't need to
travel too much; it's a long way by (the typically safer) train to
get to continental Europe, as you're well aware.
if you feel drawn to the great many opportunities afforded by being an
artist in the EU but: can't bear the creeping anxiety born of border
improvisations, shudder at the thought of marriage (in and out of love),
don't want to step back into a UNI or yield as a contract artist-hand,
then yes, you're far better off trying to make it work back in NZ in my
opinion.
i 'winged it' here before aquiring residency status for several years.
the feeling of not being settled becomes a difficult and compromising
psychological force and one that will only eat at your practice in time.
going back to NZ won't - from experience - increase your options for
organising residency in the EU unless you have an existing offer of work
and need to submit paperwork while within your 'country of origin'.
i was luckily allowed to apply for a Danish work visa from Brussels and
did not need to return to NZ while the paper work went through. from
what i hear this is far from a rule-bound case.
given your abilities, ideas and capacity to 'network' i would think
you will soon enough find yourself in a position which grants you the
time you need and/or want here in the EU. that may result in you needing
to wait it out in NZ while sufficient locks of red tape are woven.
HTH
julian
--
julian oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://selectparks.net
messages containing HTML will not be read.
_______________________________________________
Ada_list mailing list
[email protected]
http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
