Call for applications - 2024 Principal Residency Program

On March 1, 2023, La Becque | Artist Residency has launched its new call for applications for its Principal Residency Program, seeking residents for 2024.

Located on an exceptional slice of lakeside land on the shores of Lake Geneva between Vevey and Montreux, in proximity to all cultural and natural points of interest of Switzerland, La Becque hosts and fosters the creativity of artists of all backgrounds and disciplines.

La Becque's Principal Residency Program offers three- and six-month residencies to selected applicants (individual, duo or collective), to be held between January and November, 2024. Details about the full yearly calendar and proposed residency periods in 2024 are available on La Becque's website, which provides all information and forms pertaining to the call (application criteria and guidelines, FAQ, and application form).

The Principal Residency Program is oriented towards confirmed artists as well as up-and-coming practitioners with a high development potential. Curators, critics and theorists active in research fields connected to cultural practices are also encouraged to apply. La Becque continues to dedicate particular attention to projects exploring the interplay of the notions of nature, environment and technology.

A purposefully broad playfield opens up very diverse yet similarly rewarding avenues of exploration, with the intent of furthering artistic practices that develop new ecologies of thinking and sensing. For example: documenting what and who makes up the “Anthropocene”; exploring what related processes of decolonisation feature in acts of “decolonizing nature”, investigating notions such as natural exploration and extraction, interspecies communication, para-technologies and nature-bound knowledge, the politics of nature; using technological tools to document and transcribe natural environments into artistic contexts; exploring new junctures at which technology becomes part of our natural environment, and vice versa.

La Becque's residency offers a special time for reflection rather than a focus on production for its residents, who benefit from an exceptional location and infrastructure, as well as networks conducive to accomplishing the project they have been selected for. Deeply convinced of the importance of these moments of transition and reflection, La Becque is primarily interested in facilitating phases of research and other modes of transition in the artistic work, rather than capitalizing on the creation of its residents.

Principal Residency Program participants will be selected globally by a transdisciplinary jury of experts. The jury selecting 2024 residents is composed of percussionist Alexandre Babel (Berliner Ensemble, Eklekto Geneva Percussion Center), François J. Bonnet (director, INA GRM Paris), Patrick de Rham (director, Arsenic Lausanne), Stefanie Hessler (director, Swiss Institute), artist and curator Deborah-Joyce Holman, Elise Lammer (curator and art critic, Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel), Boris Magrini (curator, HEK—Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel), visual artist Mai-Thu Perret, and Stefano Stoll (director, Images Vevey), joined by Fondation Françoise Siegfried-Meier board member Tamara Jenny-Devrient and La Becque director Luc Meier.