An arts residency is crucial for activists in today’s world because it offers a rare and vital space for reflection, renewal, and creative strategy. In a time when social justice movements are often reactive and exhausting, causing burnout and polarization, an arts residency allow activists to step back from the front lines to explore deeper questions, reimagine their work, and connect with others across issues, borders, and tactics and foster the kind of radical imagination and interdisciplinary collaboration that can sustain long-term change.

Beyond method and strategy, art as feminist culture.

Often art is seen as a way to make things pretty, light and easy to digest in an age of social media. This is not the role we see for art in feminist spaces. We see artistic freedoms to equally be about baring realities in ways that words and analysis cannot, as it is about re-imagining our worlds in sensory ways. 

Using artistic methodologies is about creating a culture of our feminist movements - a visual and narrative culture. By bringing metaphors from our languages, lands, ecosystems to a convergence of our diverse voices and lived realities, we are co-creating a culture for our movements that is informed by our struggles but also what we celebrate on our lands. In doing so, it is important to think that art becomes a central strategy which should have equal space for beauty and pain. 

Building forests to explore the landscape of our movements

This residency will bring together feminist activists  to study and make trees to learn new ways of seeding, surviving, standing, gathering, thriving. We will make a forest working with methods of sculpture, sewing and other mixed-media. Each one of us will build trees that reflect the landscapes we identify with as activists (be that of bloom or decay), and learn from the myths and facts of the specific tree and its role in the forest in order to reflect on positionality, friendships, solidarities and tactics of our social justice work.