Open Call: Residency for Nordic and Baltic curators and researchers to develop the production of ūmėdė’2024 festival

The curators of ūmėdė’2024 invite applications to build future contingencies together and come up with draft proposals for the 2nd edition of the festival. The selected researcher (artist/curator/practitioner) will have the opportunity to immerse themselves for 2 months in the local context of Vilnius and the cultural complex SODAS 2123. During this time (and perhaps a couple of months after the end of the residency), they will research and come up with a proposal for ūmėdė’2024, scheduled to take place between June 13–16, 2024.

Documentation of the first edition of the festival might help you feel its context better: www.umede.lt. Selected candidates should preferably build their proposals on existing SODAS 2123 resources, its community of residents and the archive of the previous edition of the festival (http://umede.lt/archive.html).

The curators of the residency and the festival are artist-researcher Gailė Griciūtė, curator-researcher Vytautas Michelkevičius and artist-researcher Ignas Pavliukevičius.

Curatorial guidelines for the residency:

Vytautas wonders: why should I stay online if the shadow of a shy oak tree is sheltering me? I sit down on the grass and feel in symbiosis with the underground mycelium. As a curator of the field formerly known as new media art, I feel able to foresee the future and the nexus between media and non-media, human and non-human species. Maybe you feel that you have similar powers?

Gailė asks: what are the paracusias for mutable future scenarios? By asking this, I feel free to hear and create possibilities, experiencing the closeness between myself and the present in the future.

Ignas is fascinated by the potential of digital live forms to create new versions of reality, and the possibility of embodying other bodies and species. Particularly interested in how digital entities form relationships with the physical bodies of humans, and what human bodies offer them in return, he asks: how to transcend an anthropocentric perspective of agency and creativity to encourage viewers to consider the intentionality of digital entities?

Keywords for the residency:

New models of interaction proposing kindness and compassion, futuristic ecologies, attentive listening, watching and observing as a means to share knowledge, not doing, rituals and repetitions, artistic intelligence, post-disciplinarity, chimeras of art & science, slowness, neo(n)folk, participatory and temporary communities, offline, performative, a very long dinner table, non-human agency, non-anthropocentric agency, AI intentionality, artificial beings, intimacy with artificial beings, transcending a human-centric view of creativity, cultural objects, investigative aesthetics.

More about ūmėdė’2024 curators:

Gailė Griciūtė is interested in sound, its behaviour in space and time, as well as the interrelations, manipulations and multiplicities of layers and existences. In a sonic dialogue between the ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’, Gailė creates sensory spaces for thought processes and new perceptions, questioning how artistic actions can have a conscious role in environmental processes.

Vytautas Michelkevičius is restless (keen) in finding what happened after media art evaporated into the atmosphere and what is going to replace it by 2040. He is curating, writing and researching post-media art and its leftovers. To sum up, art has never been an autonomous field and recently, it got another chance to hook up with technologies, research and society. Moreover, he hopes that (artistic) practice generates new theories and will help us better understand the future.

Ignas Pavliukevičius fancies digital forms of representation that can create new versions of reality. Realities that dissolve boundaries between the self and the other, occupying other bodies and species, asking how digital entities are forming relationships with our physical bodies, and in turn what our bodies are offering them. The momentous question: how does digitalisation shape the meaning of what it takes for someone to be a human?

The SODAS 2123 cultural complex is a self-governing community-based space, operated and curated by the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LTMKS). It brings together creators and researchers from different fields, with practices based on experimentation and developing unexpected formats.

With over 50 artists’ studios, rehearsal studios for bands, offices for design, film and visual arts organisations, exhibition spaces, event spaces, various workshops, a café, a public outdoor garden space, a public allotment and more, SODAS 2123 provides space for a variety of art and cultural disciplines and each resident of the complex is open to sharing, learning and craftsmanship.

By giving the residency programme participants curatorial support, opportunities to consult residents about their artistic projects and research, as well as organising studio visits to local artists’ studios, project spaces, exhibitions spaces and other residency centres, the SODAS 2123 residency programme aims to build long-term relations between visiting artists and the local art scene.

Residency dates: 

– April & May 2023 (1 place)

– June & July 2023 (2 places)

Three artists/curators/researchers will be selected and invited to live and develop their residency projects in SODAS 2123. The curators ask applicants to come up with a draft proposal and respond to the keywords while applying for the residency.

The residency grant is 1600 EUR per artist (tax inclusive). The residency also covers travel to and from the residency up to 200 EUR.

Only artists from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Estonia and Latvia (as well as the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland) are eligible to apply.

Residents will be living in studio apartments at SODAS 2123. The complex is located in a repurposed school building about 15 minutes walk from Vilnius Old Town, in a calm and friendly neighbourhood called Rasų Kolonija. The residency provides individual rooms (28 m² individual room with kitchenette and bathroom or 27 m² individual room with shared kitchen and bathroom) and the opportunity to work in a shared studio.

Please fill an online application form by February 20, 2023. If you have any questions, please contact SODAS 2123 residency program curator Indrė Liškauskaitė residency@sodas2123.lt.

Applications will be evaluated by the SODAS 2123 curatorial team and ūmėdė curatorial team. We will inform all the applicants regarding the curatorial team decision in March 2023.

This residency is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture. The activities of SODAS 2123 are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.