Call for applications 2021

Currently in its second full year of activities, La Becque Artist Residency in Switzerland is hosting its fourth series of residents, supporting projects by the likes of Félicia Atkinson and Bartolomé Sanson (Shelter Press), Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E), Ignacio Acosta, Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana (n-prolenta), Andreas Greiner, and James Rushford during its winter 2020 residency period.

Another 15 projects will succeed them later in 2020 as part of the institution’s Principal Residency Program, while partnership residency programs with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia as well as art schools ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and EDHEA—the Valais School of Art continue, bringing such artists as Agustina Muñoz, Monica Naranjo Uribe and Simone C. Niquille to La Becque. 

On March 1, 2020, La Becque launched its new call for applications for its Principal Residency Program, seeking residents for 2021. Application deadline is set for March 31, 2020 (11:59pm, CEST).

La Becque’s Principal Residency Program offers three- and six-month residencies to selected applicants. The residencies will be held between January and November, 2021. Contrary to 2019 and 2020, the yearly calendar at La Becque will make space for longer breaks between each residency period so as to further improve the support provided to each residency project—hence slightly reducing the number of residencies offered per year.

Details about the full yearly calendar and available residency periods in 2021 are available on La Becque’s website, which provides all information and forms pertaining to the call (application criteria and guidelines, FAQ, and application form).

It is important to note that La Becque only accepts applicants’ submissions every second year. If you have applied in 2019 for a 2020 residency, you may unfortunately not submit an application this year (write again in a year—it’s not that long a wait!).

The Principal Residency Program is oriented towards confirmed artists as well as up-and-coming practitioners with a high development potential. It continues to 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 diverse yet similarly rewarding avenues of exploration—for example: documenting what and who makes up the “Anthropocene”; investigating notions such as exploration, extraction, the politics of nature, interspecies communication, proto-technologies and nature, etc.; 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 2021 residents is composed of percussionist Alexandre Babel (Berliner Ensemble, Eklekto Percussions), Patrick de Rham (director, Arsenic 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, SALTS Basel), and Stefano Stoll (director, Images Vevey), joined by Fondation Françoise Siegfried-Meier board members Anne-Catherine de Perrot and Tamara Jenny-Devrient, and La Becque director Luc Meier.