Do we create in the landscape or with the landscape?
The Sharing Places Lab was a gathering organised by AADK Spain in collaboration with The Festival Academy designed to explore the interactions between art and the territory. It took place from 15-22 October 2024 in Blanca, Spain. Professionals from all artistic disciplines came together with cultural leaders and festival managers from The Festival Academy community to debate how the landscape can influence our ways of creating and how our artistic practices can affect the landscape and its local communities.
Artistic creativity does not have to be limited to traditional spaces such as galleries and art centres. The landscape can be a living and dynamic element where ideas can flourish in unexpected ways. Through site-specific interventions, installazions and outdoor performances, artists as well as audiences explored how the unique characteristics of a place can influence the development of innovative works.
The partners aimed to delve into how different natural and rural environments can be not only the backdrop but also an active element in the creative process. The Festival and AADK Spain believe that geography, history, and local identity of each place have the potential to open new perspectives and trigger a fertile dialogue between art and the space we inhabit. In this context the geopgraphical diversity of participants contributed to enriching the conversations about different notions of territory.
Sharing Places was therefore a gathering designed to reflect on the friction points and enriching aspects of creative research in natural environments.
What is an artistic residency?
The meeting was furthermore an opportunity to reflect and rethink the meaning of an artistic residency to understand its potential as meeting points for art and land but also to inquire about its possible negative impacts on sites and local communities.
AADK and their residency spaces and programs served as a best practice example and landscape and site-specific artworks presented were created during 2024 in the framework of AADK Spain’s Immersive Residency Program in Salinas del Curro, an abandoned salt flat.
Participants explored together the area of Ricote Valley, reviewed a series of artworks and engaged in deep conversations in hybrid panel discussions and in-person working groups.
Conversation topics were co-curated and guided by the needs and questions of the participating cultural leaders and festival managers, coming from Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, What does a residency/residency space mean in the broader global context of today and the conflicts affecting directly the Mediterranean and SWANA region? and How can we build new support systems and solidarity as well as artistic exchanges/collaboration between artists and residency spaces in these regions?