The art of the residency
The most useful residencies do more than give an artist a room and a deadline. They create enough time and trust for a practice to meet its local context.
Slow down the calendar
Residencies are often described through dates, deliverables, and final presentations. Those details matter, but they are not the work itself. The work is the time in between: noticing a place, meeting people, and allowing an idea to change shape.
Da Nang, Berlin, Cape Town
Across residencies and creative exchanges, the location is not a backdrop. In Da Nang, Berlin, and the planned work in Cape Town, the value comes from how artists encounter local rooms, businesses, and communities.
A residency can support a neighborhood when the artist is treated as a participant rather than a temporary consumer of atmosphere.
Creative work gets deeper when it has somewhere real to be responsible to.
Vulnerability is part of the format
Collaboration asks people to be unfinished in public. Good residency design makes room for that uncertainty, while still giving everyone clear expectations about access, care, credit, and what is being shared.
The outcome may be an artwork, but it may also be a relationship, a new local connection, or a way of seeing a place that did not exist before.
Find a room for creative exchange.
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Adapted from the original residency note, published 20 November 2025. It describes a practice and set of experiences, not a universal residency model.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.