Rotating AiRs collaborating spaces

Global artist-in-residency Programme 2027–2028

The storms, both natural and political, we experience today are a result of the voyages once enabled by the wind that blew ships from port cities such as Antwerp, Barcelona, and Hoorn to countries known as DR Congo, Mexico, and Indonesia.

Much like the wind, the effects of these voyages can be understood as invisible forces; often impossible to be quantified in numbers, yet still highly influential in contemporary cultural and ecological crises. This project aims to redefine the meaning of the routes these ships once took and create an international platform on which artists can critically engage with the lasting effects of colonialism, resulting in an ongoing exploitation of nature and the threatening climate crisis that surrounds us.

Similar to the rotation of air, the artists will be rotating between formerly colonised countries and European port cities from the countries that were once their colonisers. Air in this sense becomes a metaphor for motion and the passing of time. The chapels and monasteries in which the art spaces Hotel Maria Kapel, La Capella, and MORPHO are located continue to exist, despite the changing air within their walls. A rotation of air entails a wind of fresh air blowing into the cultural and institutional structures. With this project, we aim to facilitate a rotation that allows for a change in the air of these structures that have resulted from colonialism.

The ‘rotation of air’ will take Lubumbashi, Mexico City and Yogyayakarta as the starting point from where the artists will take inspiration for the projects that they will continue in Europe and finally exhibit in Barcelona, Antwerp and Hoorn. The route the artists will take is meant to create a counter-current to the overseas voyages and the invisible forces that continue to shape our current world.

In order to expose how colonialism and climate change are inextricably linked, we need to create artistic structures that look beyond national borders. These global topics cannot be treated within national borders; they demand a broader approach that connects different localities with each other from a global perspective.

With this project, we aim to respond to the urgent need for opportunities for artists to research and have a local impact from a universal artistic perspective. The relations between climate change and colonialism and their cross-border character are ones that artists are particularly capable of making visible and tangible.

Therefore, it is important to give artists the opportunity to develop their art in a transnational manner and to connect their artistic process with different localities, generate a dialogue where they share their perspective and are open to learn from local wisdom. In this multifaceted infrastructure of AiRs, we aim to explore art, making processes in different contexts, histories and realities that will overlap and differ. This way, the artists become vessels of unwritten knowledge, rotating through different routes, crossing borders just like particles in the air.