9 residencies of foreign artists in the Ústí nad Labem House of Arts

9 residencies of foreign artists at the Ústí nad Labem House of Arts took place in a studio operating under the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně. The individual residencies sequentially followed each other and occurred between June 2022 and December 2023. The artists were invited to the residencies based on their involvement in the project – within the given topic of gardening, they prepared artworks for the international group exhibitions. Each residency ran at the Ústí nad Labem House of Arts. In addition to the partner institution from the donor state, the applicant had requested the following institutions for organizational support related to the selection of artists from their countries participating in art residencies and the international group exhibition in the Czech Republic (the Dowd Gallery - SUNY Cortland, the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery, Kunst Meran Merano Arte, the Museum of Fine Arts Split, PRECEDEE Hong Kong, the Rotor Center for Contemporary Art in Graz, Schafhof - European Center for Art Upper Bavaria in Freising, and The Trinity Session Johannesburg). In addition to the artistic research and practice carried out by the artists during the residencies, the residencies were used as a means of communication between the foreign artists participating in the project and the project’s lead curator Michal Koleček. This communication became an important resource for shared knowledge about the themes and production process associated with the realization of the artworks, as well as for the preparations to present the results of the work carried out by the individual artists at the exhibitions organized at the Ústí nad Labem House of Arts. Each residency also included a meeting among the Czech artists participating in the realization of artworks in public space in the Ústí Region and the foreign artist completing a residency in the Czech Republic, which facilitated mutual communication between all the participating artists and the intensive circulation of ideas and stimuli associated with the project theme of gardening, viewed at the wider metaphoric level, referring to the issues of community engagement and environmental responsibility for permanently sustainable development.

2 residencies of Czech artists in partner institution at Iceland

2 residencies of Czech artists working on the production of artworks for public space at Skaftfell Centre for Visual Art in East Iceland. The time frames for these residencies will be based on the possibilities of both the collaborating Icelandic institution and the residency participants. The selection of the artists for the individual residencies will depend on the specific focus of the art projects they are preparing. These residencies, which will be organised between June 2022 and September 2023, will be an important tool for developing the creative concepts of the individual artists as well as of the project GARDENING OF SOUL: IN FIVE CHAPTERS as a whole. The Czech artists on the residencies will be invited to work on a case study in Seydisfjördur, revolving around recent dramatic changes to both public and private open space in the town: in December 2020, three large landslides hit the small town of Seydisfjördur in East Iceland, the home of the Skaftfell. While nobody was hurt, fourteen houses were destroyed. Because of the incident, the municipality must now significantly rethink the town’s layout and how the residential, industrial, and recreational areas are distributed. The landscape and townscape are therefore undergoing visually and structurally significant changes. The Skaftfell proposes to look at this large-scale shaping of the town’s open spaces and the mountains surrounding the town as a form of radical gardening. The Skaftfell would like to encourage the project artists to address the challenges of remaking one’s sense of home in public and private space after a natural disaster. The artists from Czech Republic will be invited to spend time at Skaftfell as artists in residence (two months each), to research the context, and to produce new artwork, which will be shown in Seydisfjördur and at international group exhibition in the Ústí nad Labem House of Arts together with artwork created on the shared topic by local artist.