Every year in March, La Becque opens a call for applications for residencies to be held the following year. During this three-week window, applicants can submit their applications on this website. The next call for applications, for residencies in 2026, will open in March 2025.
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Participants to La Becque’s Principal Residency Program are selected globally by a transdisciplinary jury of experts. The program is open to both accomplished practitioners and up-and-coming candidates with a high potential for artistic growth. Applicants are evaluated on their practice as well as on the quality and pertinence of a residency project specifically written for their time at La Becque.
The residency program will dedicate particular attention to projects exploring the interplay of nature, the environment and technology – notions which are more than ever intertwined and at the core of contemporary preoccupations.
A purposefully broad playfield, this thematic nexus opens up very different yet similarly rewarding avenues of exploration – for example: documenting what and who makes up the “Anthropocene”; using technological tools to document and transcribe natural environments into artistic contexts; exploring new junctures at which technology becomes part of our natural environments, and vice versa.
Jury :
François J. Bonnet Composer and theoreticianFrançois J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. In addition to being the Director of INA GRM (Institut national de l’audiovisuel / Groupe de Recherches), François J. Bonnet is also the author of several books published by Urbanomic. He wrote the manifesto The Music to Come, published by Shelter Press in 2020, and the co-edited the SPECTRES series of publications, a joint project of INA GRM and Shelter Press.
As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has collaborated with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais, James Rushford or Gisèle Vienne. While his own music has been played in renowned venues and festivals all over the world, François J. Bonnet has been working closely with groundbreaking composer and electronic music pioneer Eliane Radigue, and has been performing regularly her composition in concert.
Anne-Catherine de Perrot studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Zurich before heading the Education, Health and Leisure Department at Pro Juventute Switzerland for nine years. From 1996 to 1999, she managed the AIDS research program at the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, where she helped set up the social sciences thematic axis and evaluate prevention programs. From 1999, she worked at Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, as Head of the Foreign Exchanges Sector, then Deputy Director and Head of Central Services. In these roles, she introduced evaluation methods to the Arts Council, and developed and managed the Evaluation Department. In 2009, she founded the evalure Center for Cultural Evaluation in Zurich, which she has been running ever since, carrying out external evaluations, supporting cultural policy development processes and helping to clarify the measures required for their implementation.
She is also a member of the board of trustees of Fondation Françoise Siegfried-Meier, a member of the Board of Reso – Réseau Danse Suisse, Vice-President of the Fondation Oertli and a member of the Klangbox Board.
Patrick de Rham is the director of the contemporary performing arts center Arsenic, in Lausanne, since 2017. Before that, he headed the interdisciplinary emerging arts festival Les Urbaines for 10 years.
He has also created and directed Post Digital Cultures, a symposium dealing with the relationship between contemporary arts and digital media, under mandate from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
He is or has been an expert for art juries and commissions such as the Swiss Dance Days, Corodis, PREMIO, the Irène Raymond Foundation or Pro Helvetia (for its call for interdisciplinary cooperation projects in new media). He was the first president of the ParticiMedia association, which supervises the art education structure CultuRadio among others.
Before working in the art field, he worked as sound designer at the Swiss National Radio, from 1995 to 2007.
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, editor, and the Director of Swiss Institute in New York. At Swiss Institute, Hessler has co-curated solo exhibitions by Ali Cherri, Lap-See Lam, and Raven Chacon, as well as initiated the curatorial project Spora, which invites artists to transform the institution through what she calls “environmental institutional critique.”
Previously, as the Director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, Hessler co-led the exhibition Sex Ecologies and edited the accompanying compendium on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds (with Seed Box and MIT Press, 2021).
Selected projects as an independent curator include the 17th MOMENTA Biennale, Sensing Nature, Montreal; Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II, Ocean Space, Venice; the symposium Practices of Attention, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo; the 6th Athens Biennale; and Tidalectics, TBA21–Augarten, Vienna. Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (MIT Press, 2019), and has edited over a dozen volumes.
She is a founding committee member of the New York chapter of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), and forms a part of the On Seeing editorial collective between The MIT Press and the Brown University Library.
Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Basel. The practice of Deborah-Joyce Holman is concerned with the relationship between popular visual cultures and capital and the intertwined politics of representation. Holman contrasts the exploitative potential of how images collide with capital with approaches of artistic and cinematic subversion, repetition and refusal using differing approaches across media such as video, sculpture and painting.
Their work has recently been shown in many institutions around the world, including Kunsthalle Bern (2023, Oregon Contemporary, Portland (2023), Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022), 7th Athens Biennial (2021), La Quadriennale di Roma (2020) and Auto Italia, London (2019), among others.
From 2020 to 2022, she worked at East London arts organisation Auto Italia first as Associate Director. They were the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, which ran from 2015 to 2020.
Deborah-Joyce has curated the 2018 and 2019 annual group exhibitions for the arts and music festival Les Urbaines in Lausanne, presenting newly commissioned works by over 15 international artists.
Nora Nahid Khan is a curator, editor, and author of critical texts on digital visual culture, software politics, and the philosophy of emerging technologies. She is the former executive director of the Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism in Los Angeles, which publishes the X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. In 2020, she curated the exhibition Manual Override at the Shed in New York, working with artists Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Simon Fujiwara, and Martine Syms.
She frequently publishes in journals such as Artforum and Art in America and has written essays commissioned for major exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, and the Venice Biennale. Her practice extends to a wide range of artistic collaborations, including screenplays, librettos, and films.
The first former resident to join the jury of our Principal Residency Program, Nora N. Khan maintains several direct links with Switzerland, thanks in particular to the 2024 edition of the Biennale de l’image en Mouvement, organized at the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, which she is curating with Andrea Bellini.
Leuenberger has over 25 years of experience in the visual arts bridging commercial and curatorial sectors. He is the founder and director of SALTS, a non-profit exhibition space in Birsfelden and Bennwil, Switzerland, which aims to promote interdisciplinary exchange and dialogue with emerging artists.
He is the curator of Art Basel’s Messeplatz Project and the Art in Public Space Project with Globus in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler. From 2016-2023 he was the curator of Art Basel’s Parcours sector. He has contributed widely to international exhibitions and programs including Centre Pasquart (2018), Bienne, Salon Suisse–Pro Helvetia, Venice (2017); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2015); and 14 Rooms, Basel (2014).
Previous roles include arts advisor with Frahm Ltd in London; assistant curator at Kunsthalle Zurich; and Post-War & Contemporary Art Specialist at Christie’s Auctioneers in Zurich and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. He was a committee member of Kunstkredit Basel (the nation’s oldest City Arts Council) from 2015-2020. He is currently an external Mentor at Institute Kunst Gender Nature (HGK) in Basel.
Born in Ticino (Switzerland), Boris Magrini studied art history at the University of Geneva and received his PhD from the University of Zurich.
Former head of Program and curator at HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) and current curator at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin, Boris Magrini has organized numerous exhibitions that promote transdisciplinary dialogues between artistic practices and sciences, and that address the economic, cultural and political implications of the development of artificial intelligence.
Among the exhibitions he has curated are Radical Gaming (HeK, Basel, 2021), Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (HeK, Basel, 2019), Future Love. Desire and Kinship in Hypernature (HeK, Basel, 2018), Hydra Project (Sonnenstube, Lugano, 2016) or Grounded Visions: Artistic Research into Environmental Issues (ETH, Zürich, 2015-2016). He has also published texts in various publications and his book Confronting the Machine: An Enquiry into the Subversive Drives of Computer-Generated Art (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2017) offers an unconventional perspective on digital art and its relationship to technology and society.
Luc Meier studied international relations in Geneva. He then spent over ten years abroad, working on cultural projects in Japan and in the United States. From 2008 to 2012, he developed swissnex San Francisco’s and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia’s common art and technology program and directed it out of San Francisco.
Upon his return to Switzerland in 2013, he coordinated the curatorial development of ArtLab at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and was its director of programs until June 2018. A programmatic and architectural initiative, ArtLab brings together art, science and technology in an exhibition infrastructure designed with architect Kengo Kuma. Since August 2018, Luc Meier is the director of La Becque | Artist Residency.
La Becque also supports long-term projects of artists based in Switzerland and beyond by offering them a residency adapted to the needs of their project.
The proposals selected for these satellite residencies deal with the themes addressed by the Principal Residency Program, i.e. the interactions between nature and technology.
La Becque is partnering with the ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne to create a new residency format to welcome renowned artists and teachers. The first joint venture between La Becque and an art and design school, the initiative offers the opportunity to residents to conduct a personal project at La Becque while guest lecturing at ECAL within one of the department over the course of an entire semester.
More information regarding the partnership on ECAL’S WEBSITE.
The EXECAL residency program at La Becque aims at fostering research projects and promoting excellence in art and design education. It offers two ECAL alumni per year the opportunity to each participate in a four-week residency to develop a project while benefiting from an exceptional setting and infrastructure. The call for applications is open to all ECAL alumni, coming from all disciplines, who graduated at least three years before the beginning of the residency programs at La Becque.
In association with Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, La Becque participates in the Swiss dynamics of international cultural exchange: it selects and hosts artists as part of the exchange programs helmed by Pro Helvetia’s offices abroad, and develops residencies for exploration, production and co-curation with the Swiss Institute in New York and the Centre culturel suisse in Paris, two of the main hubs for the dissemination of contemporary Swiss artistic practices abroad.
Following a long-standing collaboration with the former Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Nestlé joins La Becque’s main partners in making available the equivalent of three months’ residency each year. Aimed at a number of high-profile regional cultural institutions, including Plateforme 10 and the Biennale Images Vevey, as well as the winners of the Nestlé Young Artists’ Award, this partnership is designed to support and promote creative development in the Lake Geneva region.
Each year, the city of Lausanne’s museum hub, Plateforme 10, which brings together the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts (MCBA), the canton’s photography museum (Photo Elysée) and the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (mudac), hosts several creative and research residencies at La Becque.
La Becque offers a Bachelor’s or Master’s graduate from EDHEA – The Valais School of Art the opportunity to spend three months at La Becque, developing a project in line with the themes dear to both institutions.
Initiated by artlink and supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Shifting Places is an initiative assisting artists affected by war to continue their work in Switzerland. The initiative is addressed to artists who have either fled to Switzerland from war or who are still living in war affected countries. Shifting Places is built around three main pillars of artistic work; Networking, Creating, Sharing, and gives professional artists and cultural practitioners from all artistic disciplines supported by Pro Helvetia the possibility to continue their professional activity and to integrate their practice into the artistic scene of Switzerland.
La Becque is partnering with the Mise en Place Cooks! residency program created by the creative culinary center Deli Social in Lausanne to host month-long culinary residencies on the shores of Lake Geneva. This program offers selected culinary teams the opportunity to develop and test their vision of a new collective dining experience.