Artists in Residence

Design

Alexander Amir Khan

A designer working and experimenting with rubber, Alexander Amir Khan intends to o deepen his knowledge of Hevea brasiliensis during a residency in the North of Brazil, a region with a long history of rubber extraction. For his project, he intends to research historical facts of the area and exchange knowledge with locals, as well as to learn more about local traditional crafts of latex processing and manufacturing. At the end, he aims to discuss sustainable relationships between Brazil and Switzerland.

Country of residency: Brazil

Literature

Betina González

Writer Betina González bases her project on a meeting between Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo that took place in Zurich in 1934. The encounter was a rather cold event, but it led to an epistolary relationship between the two. It also evidences how Jung played an important role in Ocampo’s work. During her research, González proposes two writing projects: a narrative essay recounting the meeting; and a fictional account of the encounter in connection with a case of an unnamed woman that Jung describes in «Memories, Dreams, Reflections»

Country of residency: Switzerland

Visual Arts

Bettina Carl

During her residency in Argentina, Bettina Carl wants to continue the research and the previous contacts she established in 2018, when she participated in a residency program in Buenos Aires. The artist, known for her drawing practice and installations, now aims to embark on collaborations with an experimental, open-ended, multimedia character. She intends to shift her practice from drawing towards site-specific and ephemeral formats: delving into the hybrid, exploring ways of merging visual signs, sound, and language, and focussing on dialogical processes.

Country of residency: Argentina

Art, Science and Technology

Daniel Hellmann

Interested in the complex relationship between humans and other animals and the implications on the environment, Daniel Hellmann has created, in 2018, a queer, vegan alter ego: Soya the Cow. This ongoing performance, music, and activism project questions the Swiss cow mythology and anthropocentric self-image in a playful and direct way. During his residency in Brazil, he intends to transfer his interests into a different cultural context, following the ecological and economic cycles. He proposes to research the connection between Switzerland (a country that imports soybeans) and Brazil (a major producer), the entanglement and the interconnectedness of global food supply chains, cattle-driven deforestation, and its impact on the environment and the climate. After getting in touch with local producers and activists, his aim is to create an incomplete but multi-layered collection of stories that takes soy and cows as a starting point for a deeper reflection on the interconnectedness of all lifeforms in this eclectic, more-than-human world.

Country of residency: Brazil

Visual Arts

Diambe da Silva

«Novas Mucosas» (new mucous membrane) is ongoing research by Diambe da Silva based on creole edible roots. Those materials are the starting point for a sculptory practice in bronze foundry. During this project, Diambe plans to dive into food markets in Switzerland to understand the food culture and trace parallels with his original research in Brazil. After investigating what exists of African, Amerindian, and Asian roots in Swiss markets, the artist intends to create a new sculpture. The idea is to discuss the legacy of the Brazilian Antropofagia (the modernist principle that one should digest foreign culture in order to combine their influences with national culture), understand how we can blend those roots, and find, in food, a memory value.

Country of residency: Switzerland

Music

FRONTE VIOLETA

In their research, Anelena Toku and Carla Boregas, from the duo FRONTE VIOLETA, seek to relate to the natural environment not as a setting for their performance but as a way to dilute human protagonism. Thus, the artists search for nature’s subjective manifestations experience and evoke this memory that goes beyond matter. For this research, the duo will get in touch with the Swiss landscape, both natural and cultural, to awaken sensitivity through a poetic-aesthetic dialogue with the environment. The artists intend to delve into experimental sound and visual processes, using field studies, composition with synthesizers, field recordings, video documentation, and image manipulation.

Country of residency: Switzerland

Sound Art

Guely Morató

Founder and director of SONANDES, a Bolivian platform dedicated to musical experimentation and sound art, Guely Morató has been working, since 2020, in «Wak’a: Neo-Extravism, Sacredness & Deep Listening», a project that articulates collaborations between Bolivian artists and practitioners from other countries. During her residency, Guelly intends to compositionally develop the multi-channel sound art exhibition of the «Wak’a» curatorial project as well as the study of sound spatialisation with an emphasis on engineering designed for an itinerant exhibition that brings together sound pieces from Africa, Asia, America, and Europe.

Country of residency: Switzerland

Visual Arts

Ishita Chakraborty

Ishita Chakraborty’s art practice is marked by the traces: displacement, traumas of colonialism, articulation in language, orality, and identity. It investigates strategies and discourses of resistance narrated by individuals who create a narrative of micro-histories that conventional history has not been able to tell. In «Resistência: The Voices of the Rivers», the artist will continue a project that investigated the climate migration in Sundarbans Forest, in India. Now in the Brazilian Amazon, she intends to combine these two worlds’ encounters with animals, plants, insects, water, people, spirits, and voices as an inseparable community. She proposes a collaboration with local artists, research on indigenous knowledge on fungi and resistance, besides an immersion in more sustainable, collective, and ecological artmaking.

Country of residency: Brazil

Visual Arts

João Modé

With research in constructivism and concretism, João Modé bases his residency on the participation of Max Bill [CH] in the first São Paulo Biennial, in 1951, with the work «Tripartite Unit», a fundamental piece to open ways to concretism in Brazilian art. From that historical fact, he plans to openly research the geometrical art movement in Switzerland and in Europe, not only in the field of visual arts but also in architecture and graphic design, and to compare these forms to the contemporary dystopia. This project, entitled «HORIZON_T_E», is an extension of the research Modé has conducted since 2013, when he started a group of works called «Constructive [Paninhos]», using kitchen cloths, scarves, and sheets from his home. Those pieces are a kind of homage to the abstract-geometric tradition of Brazilian art.

Country of residency: Switzerland

Interactive Media

Joaquina Salgado

As a digital artist, Joaquina Salgado combines different technologies to create experiences that blur the boundaries between the physical and the dream world. She is interested in the relationship between humans and machines and the artefacts that form our construction of reality. During this project, entitled «Co-afinación» (Co-tuning), the artist aims to explore the poetics of mediations and the transfer of energy from one location to another. Using Unreal Engine, a videogame engine software, she proposes to create a virtual environment in which she will be able to stream live motion capture data over the Internet, allowing users in multiple remote locations to interact in the same shared digital space. To achieve this, she will use Mocap data through devices such as Perception Neuron.

Country of residency: Switzerland