Orkney Islands Group Residency AIR, SEA AND SOIL: MICRO-MACRO

09 – 16 SEPTEMBER 2023
APPLICATION DEADLINE: THURSDAY 14 AUGUST 2023
MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 9
PLACE: BIRSAY, ORKNEY, SCOTLAND

AIR, SEA AND SOIL is The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Group Residency programme that takes place in Scotland’s Orkney Islands and is a partnership with The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness.

MICRO-MACRO 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 are welcomed from fields where relationship to and investigation of place and site are of central focus such as art, archaeology, architecture, botany, cartography, collecting/collections, design, folklore, geography, geology, geotechnology, history, landscape(design), mythology, performance, walking and writing.

MICRO-MACRO will take place at Linkshouse, in the historic area of Birsay beside the Atlantic Ocean, and at sites of natural and archaeological importance in Orkney. The Group Residency has been devised by Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen (The Museum of Loss and Renewal) and will be delivered by Tracy Mackenna and a range of multidisciplinary Orkney-based experts who have in common site-specific, participatory and socially engaged practices. Their diverse skills, expertise and modes of working are activated to investigate collecting, energy, (imagined)futures, (layered)histories, (stratified)landscape, (experimental)mapping, memory(ecological, material and ruin), recording, site(responsiveness), (intersections of)material/immaterial realms, (deep)time and walking as practice.

The Group 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.A final publication (e.g. digital, material, hybrid) will be designed and published by The Museum of Loss and Renewal, and presented publicly.

The programme is devised around a bespoke itinerary, with carefully crafted indoor sessions that focus on expanded approaches to discussion, presentation, making and sharing. Outdoor sessions will introduce residents to the stunning natural landscape and world-class archaeological sites. Utilising individual practices, residents from diverse cultures and creative disciplines will focus on different ways of responding to place through immersive, connected experience in site, land and weather.

Designed to be supportive, the partially-structured programme will enable residents to develop their skills, and understanding of place across a range of approaches and technologies. The residency experience will stimulate new ways of thinking and experimentation through production, research, co-learning and presentation. The programme will provide a framework and act as a catalyst for deepening observation and expanding awareness of the non-human and human world.

By thinking and doing through the lens of MICRO and MACRO approaches, and analogue-digital relationships, we will explore layered histories whilst inhabiting a stratified landscape that is 400 million years old. Residents will be enabled to activate dynamic haptic, sensory and experiential articulations of place, and to express the psychogeography of space, experimenting with what it means to transpose and transcribe, inventing while sifting through the multiple histories and geographies of carefully chosen locations in the Orkney Islands.

Facilitator, contributors and residents will together explore site-responsive and reflective approaches to experiment with the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing. Residents will be encouraged to traverse internal and external worlds, thinking about deep time, while embracing weather’s sensory and cyclical rhythms.

Guided walks and readings will happen in selected locations that evidence occupation, abandonment, and renewal: delicate places in the group residency’s environment, triggers for imagining and inventing new futures and histories. Members of Orkney’s creative and research communities who hold precious knowledge of local history past and present, will contribute to bespoke sessions.