Call for applications: Principal Residency Program

The new artist residency La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland has opened the first call for applications for its Principal Residency Program. La Becque seeks residents for its Principal Program for residencies starting in April, 2019. The opening of the call for applications coincided with three festive Opening Days held on La Becque’s lakeside site, with the support of Vitra, ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and ECAV - the Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais.

The Principal Residency Programs will offer three- and six-month residencies to selected applicants. The residencies will be held between April and December, 2019. Application deadline is October 14, 2018. 

All information and forms pertaining to the call for applications (application criteria and guidelines, FAQ, and application form) are now available on La Becque’s website.

An initiative of Fondation Françoise Siegfried Meier, La Becque ambitions to host and to foster the creativity of artists of all backgrounds and disciplines. Residents will benefit from an exceptional location and infrastructure, as well as access to networks conducive to accomplishing the project they have been selected for.

The Principal Residency Program is oriented towards confirmed artists as well as up-and-coming practitioners with a high development potential.

The residency program will dedicate particular attention to projects exploring the interplay of nature and technology—two notions which are more than ever intertwined and at the core of contemporary preoccupations.

A purposefully broad playfield, this thematic nexus opens up very different yet similarly rewarding avenues of exploration—for example: documenting what and who makes up the “Anthropocene”; using technological tools to document and transcribe natural environments into artistic contexts; exploring new junctures at which technology becomes part of our natural environments, and vice versa. 

Principal Residency Program participants will be selected globally by a transdisciplinary jury of experts. The jury selecting 2019 residents is composed of percussionist Alexandre Babel (Berliner Ensemble, Eklekto Percussions), Vincent Baudriller (director, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne), visual artist Latifa Echakhch, Jean-Paul Felley (curator and director of ECAV - the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais), Sabine Himmelsbach (director, HEK—Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel), Elise Lammer (curator and art critic, Institut Kunst HGK FHNW, HEAD—Genève, SALTS Basel), Stefano Stoll (director, Images Vevey), joined by Fondation Françoise Siegfried Meier board member Tamara Jenny-Devrient and La Becque director Luc Meier.

In addition to its Principal Residency Program, La Becque will launch several Partner Residency Programs. To coincide with its inauguration events, La Becque is proud to announce the two first such partnerships: one of them with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and its South American cultural exchange program, Coincidencia; the other with ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. Details for both partnerships and their respective residency programs will be announced shortly.