NAC is seeking applications for its international residency programme in 2022 and 2023 for participants working in a wide range of disciplines.
Application deadline: 9 January 2022 Midnight EET (Helsinki)
The residency programme at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (NAC) grants selected participants the opportunity to live and work in Nida, Lithuania for a period of between two and five months. The programme’s goal is to provide undisturbed time and space for residents to focus, and through exchange, gain insight, broaden, and diversify their outlook.
The programme has the capacity to host up to five participants at a time. NAC regularly works with artists, curators, designers, architects with links to and a focus on history, ecology, politics, and social sciences. The programme is open to designers, architects, and curators, as well as practitioners working with performing arts, sound, material research/craft, and film. In addition, proposals for a residency by professionals from other fields are always welcome. The NAC residency programme is not open to BA or MA students. The residency does not offer or facilitate exhibitions or studio visits on a regular basis, but participants are welcome to propose formats and activities beneficial for their work acknowledging the specific context of NAC.
NAC is located in a unique UNESCO World Heritage Site, surrounded by the particular and distinct landscape of the Curonian spit: forest, sand dunes, a freshwater lagoon, and the sea. NAC is a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts and in addition to the international artist-in-residency programme, it organises art and research projects, exhibitions and hosts students’ seminars.
For further information and application form please refer to the NAC website:
https://nidacolony.lt/en/1830-open-call-individual-residencies-2022-2023
Applications are open to participants from the Nordic European region: Åland Islands, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden.
In the art and literature of antiquity weaving unites political wisdom and domestic peace. Associated with knowledge, it stands as a response to external threats of chaos, symbolising the imposition of a particular harmony or unity on disparate and disordered elements by weaving them together or somehow preserving their integrity and transcending the passage of time.
Applying a material-based methodology to weaving as techne, the residency is conceived as both a production and research residency – a space to unfold the legacy and significance of this rich and complex technique, skill and craft. We are looking for participants who are conceptually, theoretically, historically or philosophically interested and / or technically equipped and experienced in working with analogue weaving, embroidery, knitting and felting techniques.
We are interested to connect this residency to the Neringa Forest Architecture programme that focuses on the features of both the human-made and natural forest: its ecological rhythms, organic and industrial material cycles, timber-based material development, socio-political discourses, history, forestry and policy-making; art, design and architecture. In this project, the trees of the Curonian forest and all of its distinct eco-socio-political features are literally, and figuratively, the foundational material of the programme.
For the Weavers’ Residency we see the practice of weaving and the analogue loom as a ground material to open up other ways of reading the unique landscape of Nida – its colour palette, the embodied knowledge, and the socio-political context, which highlights the necessity of skills, some lost and forgotten, some newly discovered. We seek participants with an established body of work and a practice that reflects and incorporates the meaning and outreach of weaving techniques as part of the story-telling immersed in political, economic, gender, and historical discourses, and as techniques used to develop complex narratives, structuring roles and identity patterns.
For further information and application form please refer to the NAC website:
https://nidacolony.lt/en/1829-open-call-weavers-residency