We are pleased to introduce an exciting group of artists from Switzerland and from Southern, East and West Africa who have been selected for residencies in 2024.
The annual residency programme is a cornerstone of our work, providing artists from Switzerland and the regions of the liaison offices the opportunity to spend substantial time living and working in a very different daily context. Residencies normally span up to three months, and offer possibilities for a rich immersive experience and ground for new work, new collaborations and new projects to organically emerge from the fundamental basis of any significant artistic endeavour: the right amount of time and space.
Residency applications are received through an open call, which are carefully considered by experts from ours and the Zurich office. Special attention is given to the clarity, coherence and local relevance of each submission, as well as the positioning of the residency experience meaningfully within the artist’s overall professional trajectory. We work with a network of partners in the region and in Switzerland to design bespoke residencies for the selected artists.
Selected artists from Switzerland:
Salvatore Vitale | Visual Arts
Country of residency: South Africa
Salvatore Vitale is an Italian born, Swiss-based artist, editor, and educator. In his multi-layered artistic practice and research, Salvatore ’s work focuses on the development and complexity of modern societies exploring power structures, political cosmologies and technological mediation, whilst using expanded documentary analysis, including elements of fiction, speculative storytelling and the use of multiple visual forms. His work has been awarded internationally, including the PHmuseum Award (2017), the Swiss Design Awards (2018), the Foam Talent (2018), the Punctum Award (2018), the Pro Helvetia Shanghai Research Grant (2019-2020), the Bally Artist of the Year Award (2021), the MAST Photo Grant (2022), and the Swiss Design Awards (2023). Salvatore’s work has been exhibited widely in museums and at photo festivals, with solo shows internationally.
Alina Amuri | Music
Country of residency: Ghana & Democratic Republic of the Congo
Alina Amuri is a singer and multi-instrumentalist. Born in DR Congo and raised in Switzerland, Alina has developed her distinct style over the last ten years that fuses Afro/neo soul and trip hop. Alina was selected for SRF 3 Best Talent and was nominated for the country’s most important Swiss Music Award and with her previous album “Chasing Traces”. She won Swiss Live Talent Best Emerging Act. She has performed on stages such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Baloise Session, Future Echoes Sweden, Mondo New York Festival, Iceland Airwaves Festival. In 2023 Alina Amuri presented her next studio album Back To You. It is the most personal yet. It tells the story of her journey back to her birthplace in Kinshasa, back to her family roots.
Camille Kaiser | Visual Arts
Country of residency: South Africa
Camille Kaiser lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. Her artistic practice takes form in long-term research projects, navigating family and state archival documents that were made in Switzerland, France and Algeria between the mid 1950s and early 1960s in the context of colonial occupation and the transition to Algeria’s independence. Her textual and filmic works explore fiction as an artistic and political strategy to redirect attention and rewrite routines of collective use. She has exhibited at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Centre d’art contemporain de Genève, Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Stadtgalerie Bern, among others.
Rafael Kouto | Design
Country of Residency: Ghana & Nigeria
Rafael Kouto is a creative director, fashion and textile designer and university lecturer from Ticino, Switzerland. In 2017, Rafael launched his eponymous avant-garde fashion brand, engaging in projects that promote upcycling, community couture and sustainability. The brand was awarded the Lotto Sport & Diesel International Talents Support Awards 2019; the Swiss Design Awards 2018, 2019 and 2023 in the Fashion & Textile category (finalist 2020 and 2022) and the Gebert Ambiente Design Award 2020–2021 (finalist 2022-2023). Rafael advocates upcycling through his workshops in collaboration with various institutions and his teaching as an associate professor in Fashion Design at IUAV University of Venice. His video installation and workshop exploring participatory projects related to upcycling, climate change and open-source processes developed during a fellowship at Istituto Svizzero in Milan won the Swiss Design Awards 2023 in the category Fashion & Textile.
Fortunat Frölich | Music
Country of Residency: South Africa
Fortunat Frölich trained as a cellist, singer and conductor at the music academies of Zurich, Naples and Leipzig. As a cellist and singer, he regularly gave concerts internationally with formations of all kinds. As a conductor, Fortunat works with well-known soloists, orchestras and ensembles, including Juliane Banse, Susanne Elmark, Reem Talhami, Christian Zehnder, Basel Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Resonanz Hamburg, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Graubünden Chamber Philharmonic, Basel Madrigalists, Choeur du Maroc, choR inteR kultuR and others. Confrontation of opposites are often found in his works. In his compositions, Fortunat uses a wide range of musical and stylistic means, which certainly corresponds to his own musical career, which has taken him to a wide variety of musical genres and also to other cultures.
tracy september | Music
Country of Residency: Ghana
tracy september is a South African musician, performer and music researcher based in Zürich, Switzerland. With influences of jazz, traditional Xhosa singing and electronic experimentation. She works around themes of memory, spirit and protest, with a particular passion for improvisation. For tracy, improvisation is a way to surrender attachment and trust the capacity of one’s intuition. It is an invitation to let go. tracy uses her voice, electronics, texts, archive materials and field recordings, to tell stories that are deeply rooted in ritual, community and communion. Ritual as a transformative tool; community as the foundation for the co-creation of existence; and communion as a means for intimate fellowship. Outside of her solo projects, tracy makes music for film, theatre and dance pieces. She is a member of the band Black Pitch and is also a DJ playing under her pseudonym youngseptember.
Selected artists from the region:
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber | Literature
Country of residency: Switzerland
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Kenyan writer and the author of The House of Rust which won the inaugural Graywolf Press Africa Prize and The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. You can find her work at Enkare Review, A Long House, Lolwe, and Down River Road among others.
Noel Apitta | Transdisciplinary
Country of residency: Switzerland
Noel Apitta a.k.a SCARLETMOTIFF is an audio-visual artist from Kampala, Uganda. With a focus on abstract real-time computer graphics and an abiding love for great stories and even better music, he is always on the lookout for new ways to translate the narratives of the analogue world into the digital tongue. The tools of his trade are an ever-rotating cast of characters, currently anchored by Touchdesigner, Ableton Live, and his well worn Ableton Push 2. Since July 2020 Noel, as SCARLETMOTIFF, has created 1000+ unique video artworks as part of GENERATIVE DREAMS: his daily audio-visual art project. IN LINEAR RES, his first immersive audiovisual installation, debuted as part of the 2022 NOOR Riyadh Festival in Riyadh, KSA.
Yuck Miranda | Transdisciplinary
Country of residency: Switzerland
Yuck Miranda (Mozambique) is a multifaceted performing artist who works across music and vocal work, movement, and dance. He uses his body to create works that focus on advocacy for children and youth, LGBTQ+ and gender equality. Yuck has worked with the biggest theatre companies and cultural institutions in Mozambique. He has also been invited to collaborate with and participate in international experiences, such as the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris where he developed research for his life-long project “The Non-Identified Identities” centred around narratives of LGBTQ+ members in different countries around the world. As a queer artist, Yuck explores queerness in sub-Saharan Africa from a historical, precolonial / decolonial and contemporary perspective.
Sarafadeen Bello | Transdisciplinary
Country of Residency: Switzerland
Sarafadeen Bello is a Design Architect, arts researcher and creative based in Lagos, Nigeria. Sarafadeen’s medium of expression is through text, essays, research, design and installations. And his areas of interest operate within the overlapping boundaries of architecture, urban design, theatre, culture, social inclusion and public realm participation. Currently, his practice explores the notion of access in relation to the discourse around decolonisation, restitution and repatriation of cultural artefacts (Benin Bronzes) with interests in archival materials and the Pan-Africanist movement. Some of Sarafadeen’s achievements include participating in the remote research residency “Memory and Memoricide of Land” – Reimagining alternative model of Museum cooperated by Co.iki (Japan) in 2021 as part of “Project The Great Museum”. And received a Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation Fellowship Award 2022. As part of his residency at G.A.S. Foundation, he conducted research into Technoheritage and Archives; and curated an exhibition titled “Artefacts (Re)connecting…Can you sense them?”
Irene Piloya | Visual Arts
Country of Residency: Switzerland
Irene Piloya is a Ugandan artist currently based in Kumasi, Ghana. She uses installations, sculpture, painting and film to explore personal experience of displacement and its effects, memory and history in relation to place, identity and belonging. Irene participated in documenta 15 as part of the blaxTARLINES collective that collaborated with Gudskul collective in Kassel, Germany. She was part of the GASTHOFF 2022 in Frankfurt Germany, where blaxTARLINES worked with Staedelschule and various international artists. Irene is also part of the network of UNDER GROUND Contemporary Art Space in Kampala, organised by curator Nantume Violet.
Saliou Diop | Visual Arts
Country of Residency: Switzerland
Saliou Diop (Senegal) is an artist and musician. Despite having lost 90% of his vision in an accident, he continues to make artwork and furniture from found objects, teach children in his workshop and promote the arts in Tambacounda, the largest city in Eastern Senegal. Saliou has participated in many collective projects and group exhibitions in Senegal since 2001 and been participated in residency programmes.
Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha | Visual Arts
Country of Residency: Switzerland
Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha a.k.a. Mr Danfo is a Nigerian multi-media artist that focuses primarily on creating artworks informed by his immediate environment and personal interaction with the Lagos metropolis. Seidougha’s work engages local art forms, contemporary design, and popular culture. Seidougha re-enacts the stories of the Lagos contemporary culture in his paintings utilising divergent colours and geometric shapes in minimal forms, or through graphic designs and installations. Over the past five years, Seidougha has mostly created works that reflects his everyday interaction with the city of Lagos and its evolving urban culture. His current body of work addresses safety on the road, and references traffic signs/ signals and road markings. Seidougha’s work has been included in several publications and private collections. His first solo exhibition “Portraits of Public Figures in Lagos” was held at Alliance Française de Lagos in April 2022.
More information
- Residency in Switzerland (for cultural practitioners from West, Central, East and Southern Africa)
- Residency in West, Central, East and Southern Africa (for cultural practitioners from Switzerland)
