CAM–Centro Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, in partnership with the city councils of Lisbon and Oeiras, launches three cross-disciplinary residencies as part of the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails initiative, aiming to foster new connections between sustainability, inclusion and creativity with a locally grounded perspective.
We welcome applicants from international creatives, collectives, and researchers operating across various fields, including the visual arts, design, architecture, science, engineering, and food practices. We seek candidates passionate about contributing to a collective re-imagination and understanding of the climate crisis. Specifically, we invite proposals that embrace interdisciplinary, intergenerational and interspecies perspectives, focusing on aquatic ecosystems. Research themes include ocean literacy, new materials and regenerative food practices, with the aim of enacting meaningful change.
Each residency will receive a budget of 10,000 euros and will run for 3 months, culminating in public presentations in December 2024.
The Art & Design residency “Radical Waters–Concrete Matters” encourages prototype research projects for the public space built from water-based materials. We are keen to shift the agenda from fixing to caring, from growth to nurture, from certainty to contingency. With a focus on the bioregion Mar da Palha (Tagus River Estuary), this residency seeks proposals that foster innovative and non-extractive approaches blurring the boundaries between marine resources and urban design while promoting ecological awareness and locally grounded creative solutions.
The Art & Food residency “Eating Between Tides” encourages collaboration between visual artists, chefs, and young people. The aim is to develop a menu that includes ingredients from the Tagus Estuary, highlighting global food challenges and proposing innovative regenerative solutions to feeding in urban environments. The menu will be tested in local schools and artistic institutions in Lisbon.
The Art & Science residency “A Call to the Sea” will take place in one of the oldest Aquariums in the World – the Vasco da Gama Aquarium, in Oeiras. We seek collaborative art and science proposals that stimulate critical thinking around zoologic museum collections, encourage collaboration with non-human species, reweave multispecies histories, and bring forward new water narratives and intelligence beyond human perception.
Bauhaus of the Seas Sails is a Lighthouse Demonstrator Project of the New European Bauhaus coordinated by Instituto Superior Técnico, this project involves a consortium of 18 academic, cultural and local government partners in seven European cities (Genoa, Hamburg, Lisbon, Malmö, Oeiras, Rotterdam, and Venice). Funded by the Horizon Europe EU Programme, the initiative aims to stimulate an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability through various pilot projects. In Portugal, these include Ocean Literacy, Regenerative Menu, and Blue Makerspace which unfold through public programmes, residencies and exhibitions across the cities of Lisbon and Oeiras.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, through CAM–Centro Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, is the cultural partner in Portugal for the implementation of the three pilot projects, developed in collaboration with the City Councils of Lisbon and Oeiras.
Learn more about the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project and the Artistic Residencies on CAM’s website.