ARTS TERRITORY: VENICE
Residency Programme
Research and residency programme for experimental practice initiated by Arts Territory and held in Venice.
Arts Territory: Venice is a residency programme that offers time and space for independent research, reflection and experimentation. The programme is timed for the pandemic/post-pandemic era, experimenting with alternative and nascent models of an artistic residency that values hospitality, care and openness. Its fluid form reiterates and reconstitutes itself to adapt to emerging ideas and circumstances. Its open structure allows ideas to unfold through meaningful connections as well as conversations with partners and artists.
The residency promotes international exchange and gives space to unhurried thought with no overt pressure to arrive at a pre-established outcome. The year-round programme is dedicated to local as well as non-local practitioners and thinkers (including artists, curators, writers, researchers, cultural producers and academics) providing them with the opportunity to live and work in Venice while developing their individual projects and immersing themselves in the region’s artistic life. The objective of the residency is to enrich as well as tend to the cultural diversity already present within the Venetian creative scene by encouraging exchanges between international and local artists, researchers, communities and institutions. It aims to create opportunities for artists, curators and writers to engage in research and knowledge exchange for the purpose of cultivating their practice, by drawing on new collaborations with organisations and individuals in Venice.
In addition to developing their research, residents will have the opportunity to present their work in the form of a live event (e.g. an artist’s talk, a workshop, lecture, screening, performance, etc.). The programme will be situated within the wider institutional apparatus of Arts Territory and its curation to date. It will, accordingly, support experimentation, enable the development of new ideas and facilitate the production of new work. Thematically speaking, the residents will be encouraged to produce works that are congruent with the broad category of ritual and the role of ritual in creating identity and (re)producing a sense of belonging. An additional focus on the intersections and interplays between locality and identity will also be encouraged, relating these foci back to ritual and its role in affirming, challenging and reconstituting identities. Integral to this approach is the ongoing as well as emergent dialogue between Venetian and international partners, and the facilitation of research that draws on the regional, cultural and historical contexts of Venice.
Arts Territory: Venice will explore new means of utilising residencies as hubs for innovative research in a post-pandemic world, thus the facilities, residency space and living aspects will be subject to ongoing critique and amendment as suitably revised practices. Residents will be encouraged to harness novel modes of production in these new contexts, and their ideas and findings will be documented and used to inform future residency practices. The spatially closed, interpersonally distanced and operationally restrained circumstances we find ourselves in after the emergence of coronavirus will form key influences on the processes of production and their final outputs.
Residents will be formally and informally introduced to members of the artistic community in Venice and they will receive support from the Residency staff.
Arts Territory: Venice aims to provide: