Group Residency Programme, Orkney: Air, Sea and Soil: SOUNDINGS and SURROUNDINGS

Group Residency Programme Orkney: Air, Sea and Soil: SOUNDINGS and SURROUNDINGS

Sat 30 Aug – Sat 06 Sept 2025
Application Deadline: APPLY NOW / 1 PLACE AVAILABLE

SOUNDINGS and SURROUNDINGS has been devised around the relationships of ‘Air, Sea and Soil’, encompassing the Orkney Islands’ remarkable natural environment. Residents will be welcomed to the Birsay area of Orkney, where the bespoke programme will take place in Linkshouse’s excellent accommodation and studio facilities, and through visits to Neolithic Orkney’s World Heritage Sites.

SOUNDINGS and SURROUNDINGS will be lead by Tracy Mackenna (she/her), Artist and Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal and Erasmus Mackenna (they/them), Stage Director, Lighting Designer and Sound Designer and will be facilitated by Tracy and Erasmus.

Subject-specific contributions will be delivered by a range of multidisciplinary Orkney-based experts who have in common site-specific, participatory and socially engaged practices revolving around sound and environment. Their diverse expertise and modes of working are activated to investigate lost futures, intersectional histories, personal landscapes, experimental identities, ruin memory, site recording, deep time, marginalised communities and hidden lives.

The Group Residency is offered for practitioners and researchers working in all creative disciplines and for those who have a strong interest in the investigation of the Group Residency themes in relation to space, sound and visuals. The group will comprise of approx. ten participants.

FOCAL POINTS

• Creative practices
• Interdisciplinarity
• Technological innovations
• Synthesis of space, light and sound
• Readings of alternative theories and texts
• Co-learning
• Individual practice
• Experimentation
• Semi-structured programme
• Expert facilitator/s and guest contributors
• Collective platform for encounters
• Supportive, caring, non-hierarchical environment
• Peer and self reflection
• Fully catered
• Immersive experience
• Relationships to land, connections through place
• Location specific, inc. Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site
• Imagining futures 
• Publics; participants and audiences

AIM

The aim of the Group Residency is to develop approaches to place that are experimental, inventive in their form, and that respond to place by paying attention to the intersections and collisions between art, culture, materiality, technologies and place.

Opportunities are created for creative practitioners and researchers to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and analogue, for imagining new responses to places and the multiple, layered and contested histories they hold.

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 £1500 GBP, paid by the resident. It includes the residency programme, accommodation, full board, collection/return to nearest airport/ferry point, accommodation in en-suite rooms, work spaces and catering (3 meals each day).

More information about the Group Residency Orkney: SOUNDINGS and SURROUNDINGS:

https://tracy.mackenna.studio/the-museum-of-loss-and-renewal-residencies/group-residency-programme-orkney/air-sea-and-soil-soundings/