Residency Programme 2027
Instituto Tropical invites artists and curators from all disciplines to apply with an ongoing artistic or curatorial research project for one of two residency periods in 2027.
The programme offers a space to tropicalize that research through situated processes engaging the land, local communities, and ‘Ancestral Intelligences’ (AI). It offers time for exchange, experimentation, and collective inquiry — fostering encounters with ancient knowledge systems, local arts and craft techniques, scientific knowledge, and eco-social technologies of agriculture within already existing feeding systems. The programme offers a space and time to decolonize the senses, and to explore different economies of perception and attention. It includes access to a fig farm and an organic feeding system, alongside a workshop lead by the curators and members of the board. The residency offers an ongoing guidance to tropicalize your artistic and curatorial research practice and encounter with ‘tropical’ onto-epistemiologies (to pick at least 2 across the residency period).
1. Ancestral practices – Traditional weather and water relational practices (tiemperos y buscadores de agua) ancestral healing practices ( Temazcal, Herbs, Curanderismo); and other body-based knowledge.
2. Local artistic practices / crafts – Natural dyeing (working with local plants and trees for plant-based color extraction); barro (clay work); telar de cintura, (waist loom weaving). Cartonería del pueblo, (Mexican papier-mâché as made in the village). Piedra Volcánica, Volcanic Rock hand craft.
3. Soil practices / feeding systems – Relationships with endemic plants and species, exchange with local farmers; ancestral and emerging watering technologies, relationship practices with Popocatepetl volcano.
RESIDENCY PERIODS
- 1-15 March 2027
- 16-31 March 2027
RESIDENCY COSTS
The residency costs 900€ – which includes 10 to 12 days accommodation, meals, transport and meetings with experts.
Two or three meetings with experts (as mentioned above)
Transport to and from CDMX upon arrival/ departure of residency
The open call residency programme for institutionally or state fund international artists and curators helps to fund the work with indigenous knowledge practitioners and the artistic residencies of first nations artists and curators.
