Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), and The Public Library (Bor) are members of As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future, a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts. The project was conceived and initiated by Biljana Ciric in 2019 after conducting curatorial research in East Africa, Central Asia, and several Balkan countries.
About Maritime Portal Residency
Before the navigational expansion of European pilgrims and commerce in the 16th century, maritime exchange of labor, goods and finances, movement of peoples and cultures had flourished along ancient port regions of the south, and have continued to shape contemporary agendas ranging from geopolitical relations, environment and climate change, international trade, to migration policies and forced displacement, food security, and global co-immunity. Yet models, cartographies and vocabularies available for reading these intersectional trajectories are largely oriented around the metropole-periphery coordinates and economic criteria. Indigenous relations of subjects, objects and places, and local schemes of cultural cosmopolitanism, are either erased or written into top-down registrations of the colonial mindset, imperial struggles and competitiveness of nation-states.
In order to foster a knowledge field that intervenes within the conundrum of globalization, and to pursue connectivity across oceans and borders, we are pleased to announce the Open Call for Maritime Portal Residency, as a collaborative initiative of All the Way South x As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future. It bridges many understandings of the south that only overlap partially with the geographical South and engages the histories and realities emerged from long lines of maritime mapping and entanglement. We are looking for artists, researchers, or cultural practitioners living in southern port cities or regions, to work remotely and digitally to explore alternative maritime historiographies and cartographies from various locales. We encourage mediatized readings, articulations and documentations that sink the abstracted mode of globalization into different forms of embodiment, be it foods and textiles, sounds and architectures, folk rituals and myths.
The digital alliance of portal residency is not a temporary reaction to the obstacle of global mobility, but a long-term commitment to facilitating undisciplined practice and decentralized network in relation to the epistemologies of the south (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) that share a common struggle against colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the on-going process of southernization driven by a transnational chain of capital, infrastructure and technology.
Maritime Portal Residency provides:
Application Deadline: 5 February 2021
Notification: between 22 and 26 February 2021
Project Duration: 12 months
