Group Residency PLACE, PEOPLE and TIME: WILD WAYS

The Museum of Loss and Renewal and The Walking Library are very pleased to welcome applications for the Group Residency PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME: WILD WAYS. 

The one-week residency will take place in Collemacchia, in Italy’s Molise region, home to The Museum of Loss and Renewal.

The residency dates are 17 – 23 October 2022.
The deadline for applications is 28 March 2022 (midnight CET).

10 places are available on the residency. The minimum number of participants is 6.

ABOUT

Wild Ways is an international residency and public art project curated and facilitated through a new partnership between The Museum of Loss and Renewal (Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, Collemacchia, Italy) and The Walking Library (Misha Myers, Melbourne and Dee Heddon, Glasgow) and is part of The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s ongoing Place, People and Time group residency series. This new partnership brings together two long-standing artist duos and projects who share site-specific, participatory and socially engaged art practices in common, yet hold diverse skills and expertise between them.

Wild Ways is offered for practitioners and researchers working in all creative disciplines and for those who have a strong interest in the investigation of site and place. Applications from fields where relationship to and investigation of place and site are of central focus and are used to develop, conserve, document, explore, explain, interrogate, plan and propose such as performance, art, design, architecture, archaeology, engineering, geography, geology, geotechnology, history, landscape design and writing are welcomed. 

The online component of the Wild Ways project was a Group Residency that took place in October 2021 with residents whose remarkable range of practices spanned art, walking, (cultural) geography, performing arts, urban theory, (landscape) architecture, theatre, dance, anthropology, publishing …

In Jan 2022 PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME: Wild Ways / A co-authored public sharing of material generated during the Wild Ways online residency, 2021 was launched in a bespoke online event that included presentations of residents’ practices and research by residents.

FOCAL POINTS

– Immersive experience
– Creative practices
– Interdisciplinarity
– Technologies
– Books, reading
– Co-learning
– Individual practice
– Collective platform for encounters
– Experimentation
– Investigation of sites
– Relationships to land, connections through place
– Imagining futures 
– Humanity and nature
– Cultural and environmental ecologies
– Memory, loss, renewal
– Publics; participants and audiences
– Publication (digital)
– Outcome presented internationally

APPROACH

Working across site-specific, participatory, socially engaged and digital art and performance practices the Group Residency will take place in Collemacchia, in Italy’s Molise region where inhabitants are attempting to reinvigorate their community in the face of significant environmental and cultural change.

Working with a group of residents from diverse cultures and creative disciplines through geographically remote, synchronous and collaborative place-based making processes the Group Residency will generate and present global and local knowledge and strategies for imagining the futures of fragile cultural and environmental ecologies.

The Group Residency provides opportunities for creative practitioners to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and place-based, for imagining the futures of fragile cultural and environmental ecologies.

The residency will provide a partially-structured and hands-on programme of site-based ways of working that are shared to enable residents to develop their skills and understanding of how to investigate site as part of a creative practice and for public presentation to a global audience. The residency experience is designed to stimulate experimentation through collective and individual production, research, and co-learning. Participants investigate, share and connect their experiences of and ways of working in their own place in the world with those of others through facilitated co-creating and co-presenting modes.

Guided by the leading artists and using a combination of platforms for transmitting and presenting audio/visual/textual and located media, residents will share guided walks and readings in lost, renewed or fragile places in the residency’s environment. Members of the local community who hold precious knowledge of walking routes, architectural and local history past and present, and collecting, archiving and presenting, will contribute to bespoke sessions. The residency programme includes time for residents to work individually, developing work in progress.

The Wild Ways project establishes global perspectives, understandings, protocols and digital methods for remote and intercultural collaboration and enables residency participants to approach Collemacchia’s community and environment informed and with foresight and care.

The Walking Library has a well established method of performance that takes audiences on guided walks with shared readings from a collection of books curated for the specific context of the walk.

FACILITATORS

The residencies will be lead by Tracy Mackenna (Professor Emerita) & (Dr) Edwin Janssen (The Museum of Loss and Renewal) and Misha Myers and Dee Heddon (The Walking Library).

Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen are the founders and curators of The Museum of Loss and Renewal. Their collaborative art practice is a creative and discursive site where production, presentation, exchange, co-learning and research meet. The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s key areas of focus are social relationships, the way places are inhabited and how personal objects reflect who we are. Tracy & Edwin work with international partners to devise and present multifaceted exhibition projects that address issues of societal concern such as well-being, aging, end of life and sustainability. They are highly experienced, award winning educators who have devised and lead multiple group learning projects situated within the international museum and gallery sector, and higher education.

Misha Myers and Dee Heddon are co-creators of The Walking Library, inaugurated in 2012 as an ongoing art project that aims to bring together people, walking, books, and reading. Misha and Dee have co-authored numerous articles, artist’s pages and essays and co-edited the edition ‘On Libraries’ for Performance Research (2017).
The Walking Library

Misha is a Research Fellow in Deakin Motion Lab and Senior Lecturer in Art & Performance at Deakin University in Australia. She creates and researches performance that is staged and moves between physical and digital environments and enables diverse perspectives, knowledges and experiences of place and how it matters politically, socially, economically and environmentally. She has presented and facilitated work with isolated and marginalized groups including refugees and asylum seekers, women and rural communities in a global context.
https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/misha-myers
https://motionlab.deakin.edu.au/people/misha-myers/

Dee holds the James Arnott Chair in Drama at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of many monographs, articles and essays, including Autobiography and Performance (2008), and has co-edited a number of collections including, most recently, It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells (2016). She is currently working on Performing Forests, a monograph for Performing Landscapes, a new series for which she is co-editor with Sally Mackey.

LOCATION

The residency is located in Collemacchia, a small village within Italy’s National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, a protected area of exceptional significance and beauty. Engagement with the natural world begins on the doorstep and the mountainous landscape offers an excellent environment for reflective practice. The ancient, undisturbed and extensive terrain holds a rich and complex history visible in the area’s architecture, customs, agricultural lands and forests.

The area is sparsely populated by villages that are largely trilingual Italian-French-English due to the large community of emigrants who continually move between European nations, stemming from economic migration dating from approx. 1850. The village has been home to Tracy Mackenna’s family for centuries and the curators of The Museum of Loss and Renewal foster strong links with the local community which is highly supportive of the Residency Programme.

FEE

The Residency Programme is operated on a non- commercial cost covering basis, and is financially supported by The Museum of Loss and Renewal in order to keep fees low. The residency fee is €1100 (Euro), to be paid by the resident. The fee includes accommodation in a variety of spacious rooms with full board (3 meals each day). Ingredients are mainly locally sourced and meals are prepared by our excellent cook, Alessandra. Special diets can be catered for.

A deposit of €400 (Euro) will be required within three weeks of accepting a place on the residency. The remaining balance of €700 (Euro) is payable six weeks in advance of the residency start date.

You will be responsible for funding and organising your own travel, your own insurances and any visa requirements particular to your country of origin. Detailed travel information will be supplied (closest airports Naples, Rome), and collection/drop-off at a local train station will be arranged.

We do not have external funding for this project, so regret that we are unable to offer assistance with fees, flights, production costs or other subsistence. Typically, successful applicants source funding by applying to their national arts funding bodies, personal fundraising, or through academic institutional support. Formal letters of invitation can be provided to assist in this process.