Notions of change happen individually and collectively. In a world where personal challenges are echoed in others, these become sites for social justice. How could we shift from the singular “my” to “ours”? Our life, our planet, our existence? How to return to the earth?
In the context of multi-dimensional and interconnected global crises (environmental, economic, social, political), this residency aims to collectively speculate and practice strategies to create plural, creative movements, recognising that there’s no life without a whole ecosystem of collaboration and codependency.
The residency unfolds as a collective space to reflect on extractive relationships, not only through the investigation of physical and historical extractivist practices such as mining but as a broader condition that has shaped our ways of relating to land, bodies, and one another. A chain that reveals the paradoxes we inhabit today: from explosions that carve open the earth to the migration of minerals, transformed into weapons that go on to shatter entire countries. It is a condition of contemporary societies, entangled between connection and surveillance, consumerism and scarcity, artificial intelligence and mass extinctions, zones of sacrifice and zones of luxury.
The residency situates itself within the cracks, absences, and residues left by exploitative systems. Yet, the project proposes a shift: from extraction to (de)composition, from taking to returning, from accumulation to composting. These voids are sites of loss, but also fertile grounds where transformation can begin.
Decay is here the first step, a vital phase within the life cycle of decomposing and re-composing, where dominant systems, narratives, and imaginaries can be broken down and metabolised into new forms of life.
Within the context of an ongoing polycrisis, artistic practices are mobilised as tools for inhabiting this transition, in which endings and beginnings coexist in liminal spaces. They become a means of contestation, resistance, and regeneration. Ways to engage with the slow undoing of modernity’s extractive logic and to reimagine our economic, political, and ecological systems from their roots.