Hydromedia: ‘Seeing With Water’ Residency

The unfolding climate crisis is also a crisis of the image and the imagination. Scientific and journalistic imagery alone doesn’t seem to communicate a sense of urgency. Such imagery can be either too complicated or overwhelming. We need more artistic imagination as well as practical means to stimulate ecological imagination beyond the arts.

The artist-in-residency programme Hydromedia: Seeing With Water proposes to sidestep conventional visual approaches to global warming. Artists and experimental photographers are invited to submit a proposal to develop innovative and hands-on tools during a one-month residency in October 2023 at the Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU) and in their own studio in the months thereafter. You may extend an already existing practice or propose to make new work pertaining to the theme.

The guiding theme is water (in whatever manifestation you prefer) and the residency will be multidisciplinary. You explore your preferred angle to this theme within local settings. During the residency, you will also be offered the possibility to collaborate with (or get inspired by) the work of scientists and ecologists around water and sustainable water management.

Artists are invited to explore and develop innovative ways of looking at (or with) water by using analog and/or digital means. The creative process must be documented and processed into a type of artistic protocol, so the work will give a wider audience the tools to reimagine their relationship to nature. Furthermore, such an approach stimulates reflection on the conditions of the employed media, how a medium co-shapes us, and how water could be considered a medium, too.

Each selected artist will receive a €2000 fee, a €2000 working budget, as well as reimbursement of travel costs. Traveling by train or bus is preferred. Accommodation and subsistence will also be provided for.

Applicants must be active visual artists currently living and working in Europe and/or possess the nationality of one of the countries in the European Union.