La Becque Residencies Calendar Editions Support us Archives

Open Call

Our Call for Applications seeking 2024 participants in our Principal Residency Program is now closed. Applications sent from now will not be considered during the deliberations.

 

Calendar
Closing of the call for applications: March 22, 2023 (23:59, CET)
Meeting of the Jury: June 2023
Announcement of the laureates: July 2023

 

–> APPLICATION GUIDELINES

–> FAQ

 

The next call for applications for residencies in 2025 will open on March 1, 2024. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at applications@labecque.ch.

Principal residency program

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 :

Alexandre Babel Percussionist and composer

Alexandre Babel is a Swiss composer, drummer and percussionist based in Berlin. He is involved in various contemporary contexts encompassing modern classical music, free improvisation, noise and performance art. His work explores purely acoustic sound and blurs the boundaries between contemporary music and electronic aesthetics, through virtuoso instrumental technique. He is the artistic director of the contemporary percussion ensemble Eklekto. He was also the principal percussionist of the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin from 2010 to 2019, the drummer of noise-rock unit Sudden Infant, and the co-founder of the performance collective Radial. His compositions have been performed in various venues and festivals, including Oberlin University, the Archipel Festival in Geneva, the Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has taught at the University of Berlin, the Haute école de musique in Geneva, the University of Melbourne and the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

François J. Bonnet Composer and theoretician

François 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 in English 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.

Patrick de Rham Director of Arsenic

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 during 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 Curator, writer, and editor

Curator, writer, and editor, Stefanie Hessler’s work focuses on ecologies and technology from an intersectional feminist perspective. Director of Swiss Institute in New-York since 2022, she was previously Director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, where she has curated solo exhibitions by Jenna Sutela, Diana Policarpo, and Frida Orupabo, as well as the transdisciplinary exhibition Sex Ecologies which focused on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds.n In 2020–21, she served as chief curator for the Seventeenth MOMENTA Biennale, Sensing Nature in Montreal.

Deborah-Joyce Holman Artist and curator

Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Basel. Their work has recently been shown in many institutions around the world, including 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.

Tamara Jenny-Devrient Independent project manager

Tamara Jenny-Devrient has worked as a production manager for artistic projects in Switzerland and abroad for many years.

She has collaborated with the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on various projects, before taking on production duties for the Festival Images Vevey. Over the course of her career, she had developed a particular affinity for and experience in staging the production of monumental installations and events in public spaces. She currently works as a freelancer and carries out various mandates for cultural institutions in French-speaking Switzerland.

Elise Lammer Curator and critic

Elise Lammer (born in Lausanne, CH) is a curator engaged with exhibition making, public programming, archiving, teaching and gardening. Her work is committed to questions related to the role of space (public, domestic) in defining identity construction. Working across media and with a transgenerational and intersectional approach, her work aims to question and re-assess narratives that have suffered from monolithic, one-sided integration within History, while looking at such problematics from a contemporary prism. She is currently a PhD candidate at Institute Art Gender and Nature in Basel, and University Linz, Austria, doing research on the garden of British artist Derek Jarman. Since 2019, she’s been developing a garden in homage to Jarman’s Prospect Cottage at La Becque, where she’s also putting together an archive and artistic programme aimed at raising awareness around Jarman’s legacy. In 2015 she founded the research platform and collective Alpina Huus, a performance-led project and research collective dedicated to investigating the relationship between performance and domestic space. Elise Lammer is currently teaching the MFA Fine Arts Course at Institute Art, Gender, Nature in Basel, where she’s invested in sharing knowledge around counter-hegemonic spaces, histories, and figures.

Boris Magrini Curator at HeK Basel

Born in Ticino (Switzerland), Boris Magrini studied art history at the University of Geneva and received his PhD from the University of Zurich. Head of Program and curator at HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), 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 Director of La Becque

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.

Mai-Thu Perret Artist

Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, where she lives and works. She is known for her multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video and installation. Perret has created a complex oeuvre which combines radical feminist politics with literary texts, homemade crafts and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics. She studied English at Cambridge University and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2011 she won the Zurich Art Prize, the Prix Culturel Manor and she participated in the 54th Venice Biennale. Her recent solo shows include the MAMCO, Geneva (2019), the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Le Magasin, Grenoble (2011); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2006).

Stefano Stoll Director of Festival Images Vevey

Stefano Stoll is the director of the Festival Images in Vevey, Switzerland. Since 2008 he has specialized this biennial of visual arts in monumental outdoor installations. Every two years it proposes photographic projects made to measure in the streets, parks, the lake and on the façades but also in the city’s museums and galleries, by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Christian Marclay, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Paul Fusco, René Burri, Lee Friedlander, Alex Prager, JR, Martin Parr and Alec Soth. In this context, he also manages the Espace Images Vevey, an “off space” dedicated to contemporary photography, as well as the Grand Prix Images Vevey, one of the oldest photographic production grants in Europe. During his studies, he participated in the early days of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography as its co-director from 1998 to 2002. He then joined the artistic direction of the Swiss National Exhibition EXPO.02 before taking over the cultural affairs department of the city of Vevey until 2015. He is regularly invited as a member of international juries such as the Paul Huf Award (Amsterdam), which he chaired in 2014. As an author, he is a member of AICA Press and writes on cultural policy, art and photography.

Satellite residencies

La Becque also supports long-term projects of artists based in Switzerland or in the region 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.

RESIDENTS 2020

Yann Gross Aladin Borioli

ECAL Residences

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

Resident 2023

Brian Roettinger

Residents 2022

Irene Vlachou Yehwan Song

EXECAL Residences

The EXECAL Residence at La Becque initiative aims at fostering research projects and promoting excellence in art and design education. It offers three 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.

 

The next call for applications for EXECAL residencies will be in January 2023.

 

-> Information and requirements

Pro Helvetia

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.

EYEBEAM

Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future is a program created out of an overwhelming desire to lift the voices of artists in a time of crisis and systemic collapse. The initiative arose quickly from conversations at the outbreak of the global pandemic, when Eyebeam paused its highly distinguished flagship residency for the first time in its history and closed its physical space in order to support New York City’s effort to contain Covid-19.

Eyebeam and La Becque are like-minded organizations in support of visionary artistic practices who came together this year to bring three talented alumni of their respective organizations into the Rapid Response working group, through the generous support of swissnex Boston / New York. The two organizations share an ethos to use digital tools for the creation and distribution of art and support the production of physically distanced work that questions who controls dialogue and discussion in the 21st century.

 

To discover all the selected fellows for the second phase: eyebeam.org.

RESIDENT 2021

Aladin Borioli

EDHEA

This year, our partnership with the EDHEA – the Valais School of Art and Design is concretized in the form of a residency intertwined with the MAPS – Master of Arts in Public Spheres. We offer the opportunity to a master student to reside 3 months at La Becque in order to develop a project in line with the themes dear to both institutions.

 

 

Resident 2022

Elias Würsten

Residents 2021

M. Haryo Hutomo Dianita