Open Call | Caravan Residency Program

Thinking with Alexandria

The Caravan Residency Program is part of the Alexandria: (Re)activating Common Urban Imaginaries, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The project aims to survey the European cities of Athens, Brussels, Marseille, and Nicosia, through the lens of Alexandria an its contested urban imaginaries.

About the residency

The chimeric port city serves as heuristic device for the Caravan Residency Program. Alexandria has been shaped by the historic tensions and contested narratives of imperial and emancipatory forces. In the 13th century, it emerged as an atypical site of commercial activity and pre-capitalist trade infrastructures set up by European merchants. The New Imperialism of the 19th century then incorporated the Eastern Mediterranean into the circuitry of global economy; at that point, Alexandria was administered by the Ottomans, then bombed and occupied by the British. The city became a playground for the articulation of utopian imaginaries, hosting anarchists, intellectuals, and renegades from the Arabic-speaking region and the world over to experiment with radical modes of assembly and critique and establish popular theatres and universities, independent presses, and fugitive communes.

The opportunity to think with and through Alexandria allows us to exercise worldmaking against erasure and towards futurities. Worldmaking starts from worlds already at hand: the making is a remaking (Nelson Goodman); The Caravan Residency Program is thus an invitation to compose, toy with, and re-figure existing parts and elements structuring our everyday through a peripatetic format in Alexandria and other cities across Europe and the Mediterranean.

The year-long multi-city residency invites artists, cultural practitioners, and activists to articulate and configure new modes of relating to and understanding urban, infrastructural, and social processes and formations. The residency program engages local organizations in partner cities and works toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals outlined by the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

Sixteen participants will be selected to partake in a field, discursive and practice-based program in conversation with the residency curators, social entrepreneurs and a range of tutors and presenters working across diverse disciplines and contexts, to be tailored to the group. The residency is outcome based, and participants are expected to develop a final project as part of the program’s conclusion.

The Caravan Residency is conceived and realized by UNIDEE residency programs at Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Italy and is curated together with Edwin Nasr and in conversation with Sarah Rifky.

The residency is outcome based, and participants are expected to develop a final project as part of the program’s conclusion which will be then showcased as part of the Forums: Contemporary Alexandria in Athens, Biella, Marseille, Alexandria and Aarhus.

Residency Format

16 participants will be selected
3 residency paths will be offered for all participants
2 residency stays will be planned in Biella, Italy for all participants
1 residency will be planned in Alexandria, Egypt for all participants
1 residency in one of the following cities (Marseille, Athens, Brussels, Nicosia) will be planned for each of the participants, depending on their individual choice
1 final stay will be planned in Biella for the production and presentation of final projects

This schedule is provisional and contingent on the Covid-19 developments globally. Travel and activities are subject to being postponed between January and July 2022.

Apply now

Application and Selection

Eligibility criteria

Applicants must be fluent in English.
Applicants can be emerging to mid-career artists working in diverse media—digital, moving image, painting and printmaking, performance, photography, sculpture, sound, and text— as well as cultural practitioners and activists informed by and concerned with archival research, knowledge production, placemaking, and/or community-based engagement;
Practices demonstrating commitment towards generating new insights around urban histories and dynamics, coloniality and power formations, infrastructures and networks, and maritime cultures and poetics will be prioritized;
Applicants must currently reside within:
- an EU member state, or, the United Kingdom,
- an EU pre-accession country: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey,
- an EFTA member state: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland,
- one of the following countries of the EU Southern Neighborhood: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia.

*This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244 (1999) and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.

Please note that gender and geographical balance will be taken into account as selection criteria.

Application and selection

Application deadline 30th May, 2021
Selected participants will be informed by end of June
The final list of residents will be announced on the organizers’ and project partners’ websites and social media platforms.

Please note only accepted applicants will be contacted directly.

What is covered by the grant?

The program covers travel, accommodation and meals. Participants will receive €3,000 fee, payable in accordance to international and local laws. Additionally, each artist will have a budget of up to € 500 to cover the production costs.

Selection Committee

The submissions will be reviewed and evaluated by a jury consisting of representatives of the participating partner organizations in collaboration with the curators of the Caravan residency program Sarah Rifky and Edwin Nasr.

Questions?

If you have inquiries, please contact us at unidee@cittadellarte.it.

ABOUT THE PROJECT "ALEXANDRIA: (RE)ACTIVATING COMMON URBAN IMAGINARIES"

The project "Alexandria: (re)activating common urban imaginaries" (ALEX) aims to take a fresh look at the many challenges faced by the arts and heritage sectors, through the symbolic and historical prism of the city of Alexandria and its influences on urban development in the Mediterranean and beyond. The project is supported by the European Union's Creative Europe program.