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Art to come: residency program

Residency Program Art to come Aid program

Space for artistic processes and collaboration

The residency program is proposed as a platform to rethink the links between creation and collective action, where the political, the common, and the sensitive are activated through methodologies imagined for the context in which they occur. Each invited artist has the possibility of collaborating with an artist based in Madrid, which enriches the dialogue with the local context and expands the forms of exchange.

Residency Program

The second edition of the Art residency program to come is based on the desire to deepen some of the lines of research that began to emerge during the first year and to open new ones. The new residents arrive in a place already affected and altered by the questions, conversations, readings and writings of those who preceded them, waiting to be taken up and expanded. The residency is therefore proposed as a space from which to investigate how the forms of knowledge that run through each stay are established and transform the conditions of the programme itself; how they circulate between different people, times and contexts; and how they contribute to sustaining the collective.

The guest artists for this second edition are Eliana Otta, Sonie Villar, Marc Vives and Milena Bonilla. With them we will address issues related to contemporary ritual practices, collective mourning, fermentation as a material and political process and more than human ecologies, and we will continue to deepen the reflection on modes of coexistence, the political potential of collective work or the forms of transmission and listening in this type of process. Each guest will collaborate with a local artist who will accompany them in the research process. Their stays will incorporate new questions, tools and ways of doing things that will become part of that collective sedimentation from which the program continues to be built.

Eliana Otta

Cycle 1: 1 October – 31 December 2026

Eliana Otta’s research begins from collective mourning understood as a regenerative practice capable of rebuilding connections and opening up other forms of political imagination. Through contemporary rituals, ancestry, and the dimension of the sacred, her work explores how certain practices sustain collective life, activate shared memories, and maintain relationships of reciprocity between people, territories, and other beings. In response to the narratives of collapse and paralysis that shape the present, the residency is conceived as a space from which to attend to the many worlds that already coexist and are being defended, as well as to the narratives and forms of relationality that make it possible to imagine and sustain other ways of inhabiting what we share. During her stay, she will collaborate with Julián Pacomio, an artist, performer, and curator based between Madrid and Lisbon.

Sonie Villar

Cycle 1: 1 October – 31 December 2026

Sonie Villar’s practice investigates fermentation as a material, relational, and political process through which to consider the forms of interdependence that sustain life. By paying attention to microorganisms and to the processes of transformation that take place in soil, food, and our own bodies, their research shifts the focus towards the invisible connections that make all forms of coexistence possible. During the residency, they will explore how these processes can become a methodology for thinking about the temporalities, affects, and conditions that enable a learning community to be sustained, approaching the residency as a living culture in which relationships settle, transform, and generate new forms of shared knowledge. Their research process will include a collaboration with Estefanía Santiago, an artist working across hybrid practices and based in Madrid.

Marc Vives Muñoz

Cycle 2: 1 January – 31 March 2027

Marc Vives develops a practice situated between the visual and performing arts, in which voice, body, and collective action function as materials for exploring the transformative possibilities of a given context. Through performances, pedagogical devices, and collaborative processes, he creates situations for experimentation that shift and reformulate ways of inhabiting a space, relating to others, and organising collectively. During his residency at Arte por venir, he will bring these methodologies into the context of the programme to investigate how the residency can become a place from which to experiment with new forms of encounter, exchange, and collective production.

Milena Bonilla

Cycle 2: 1 January – 31 March 2027

Milena Bonilla’s residency will begin with a botanical and archival exploration situated in Madrid, investigating how plants can help us read the social, political, and material memories inscribed in the territory. Understood as living archives and agents of knowledge, spontaneous and medicinal species, as well as plants historically associated with particular places, will make it possible to connect transformations in urban space with forms of knowledge that have been displaced by dominant scientific, economic, and political narratives. In this way, the residency will explore how memory and political imagination can emerge when these plants are recognised as interlocutors, and how such practices might contribute to producing different relationships with the present in response to the discourses of violence and imaginaries of collapse that have become embedded in contemporary life.

Public residency program

The public program includes a study group that combines closed sessions and open activities, and that accompanies and relates the issues addressed in the different investigations. In addition to this proposal, there are other public activities linked to the work processes of the artists, conceived at specific times and in accordance with the forms, questions and needs that arise.

Every beginning is a rehearsal

El grupo de estudio de Arte por venir acompaña al programa de residencias como un espacio para abrir procesos de trabajo, compartir materiales de investigación y poner en común las preguntas que emergen durante las estancias.

The second edition takes up some of the issues addressed last year and opens up new ones related to forms of interdependence, the ability to recompose links and activate shared memories. Based on the research of Eliana Otta, Sonie Villar, Marc Vives and Milena Bonilla, we will explore different practices and methodologies to continue testing forms of encounter, exchange and collective production, and ways of inhabiting the common. We will address, among other issues, the potential of collective grief as a regenerative practice; attention to microorganisms and the processes of transformation that go through a shared space of coexistence; fermentation as a methodology for thinking about relationships and their temporalities; voice, the body and collective action as materials capable of modifying a context; and plants as tools for reading the social, political and material memories inscribed in the territory.

Every Beginning is an Rehearsal will feature the participation of, among other guests, Sonie Villar, Mercedes Villalba, Eliana Otta, Athena Athanasious, Elena Tzelepis, Marc Vives and Milena Bonilla.

PARTICIPATION AND REGISTRATION

Participation in the study group is by registration and is limited to a group of 15 people. The programme will be completed with a series of activities aimed at a wider audience to publicise both the projects of the artists and the guests of the programme.

The study group will have 10 stable participants, who will register for the full program, and 5 additional places in each session for those who wish to attend on a timely basis.

Applications must be made through the form: before September 28 to participate in the stable group and up to a week before each meeting for specific sessions.