Artist residencies are cultural tourism infrastructure
A residency can be a better way to encounter a place than a promotional campaign because it gives artists time to listen, work, and contribute.
Start with exchange, not extraction
Residencies are often marketed as a change of scenery for an artist. The more interesting model is reciprocal: artists arrive with a practice, meet local people and organizations, and allow the place to change the work. The city is not a backdrop. It is a collaborator with its own limits and knowledge.
That makes residencies relevant to tourism teams and destination organizations looking for forms of cultural travel that do not reduce local life to a list of attractions. It also makes them relevant to governments funding cultural participation and international exchange.
Measure the conditions
A useful evaluation asks more than how many visitors attended a final event. It can ask whether local partners were involved, whether artists were paid, what relationships continued, what access was created, and what the community would want repeated. Those questions protect the work from becoming a temporary content exercise.
Across cities and continents
Shona’s residency work has connected Berlin, Da Nang, Cape Town, and the wider Countercult network. Each place needs its own pace and partners. A global program becomes meaningful when it is built from local specificity rather than copied as a format.
“Sho integrates years of professional tour guiding experience directly into their art practice.”
Quoted from the public Sketchy Shona supplier profile on GetYourGuide. The live listings show how Shona is testing artist-led cultural tourism through their own practice.
Designing a residency, destination program, or cultural exchange?
Contact Shona about artist-led tourism, local partnerships, cultural programming, and responsible place strategy.
Adapted from Shona’s public LinkedIn writing on artist residencies and the public Countercult residency archive.
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.