2019 residents and 2020 call for applications

New Swiss artist residency opens its next call for applications, seeking 2020 residents

La Becque Artist Residency truly kicks off its activities with the arrival of its first Principal Residency Program laureates in April 2019. 

No less than 15 residency projects will gradually take shape at La Becque during 3- and 6-month residencies taking place between April and December 2019. Put forth by artists originating from no less than 12 countries, all selected projects take strong positions on the guiding themes of La Becque’s residency programs—i.e., the relationship between nature, the environment, and technology. 

The profiles of 2019 residents Haseeb Ahmed, Nora Berman, Rashayla Marie Brown, Gil Delindro, Mbaye Diop, Elise Eeraerts, Joan Heemskerk, Duy Hoàng, Klima Magazine, Paula Cermeño León, Anthony Pateras, Quadrature, Elise Rasmussen, Les Sirènes and Jakob Kudsk Steensen can all be consulted on La Becque’s website. 

As part of its Partnership Residency Programs, La Becque is also pleased to welcome Mitch Paone (DIA Studios) as its first researcher in residence within its ECAL x La Becque partnership residency program, developed jointly with ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. 

Paone will be succeeded by three first short-term alumni residencies during the summer, and by another researcher in residence in the fall semester. The first recipients of the one-month EXECAL x La Becque residencies are ECAL graduates Aladin Borioli, Pauline Lemberger & Iris Andreadis, and Thomas Grogan. 

Finally, as part of its partnership with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and its South American exchange program, Coincidencia, La Becque will also welcome artists Francisco Navarrete Sitja (Chile) and Ismael Monticelli (Brazil) in the second semester of 2019. 

La Becque already seeks its 2020 Principal Residency Program participants, for residencies starting in January, 2020. The call for applications opens Friday, March 15, 2019.

La Becque’s Principal Residency Programs offers three- and six-month residencies to selected applicants. The residencies will be held between January and December, 2020. Application deadline is April 15, 2019. 

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.

The Principal Residency Program is oriented towards confirmed artists as well as up-and-coming practitioners with a high development potential. It dedicates 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 2020 residents is composed of percussionist Alexandre Babel (Berliner Ensemble, Eklekto Percussions), 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, La Becque director Luc Meier, and one more jury member to be announced shortly.