Selected artists in residence 2026

Egypt > Switzerland | Music

Ahmed Saleh is a musician, composer and sound artist born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt. With a strong, interdisciplinary background in visual arts, Saleh composed his first live solo set for the 100LIVE Festival in 2009. As a founding member of experimental postrock trio Telepoetic, Saleh has shared the stage with various international acts and scored for an array of film, dance, and theatre productions. Saleh’s music has been broadcast on several radio shows around the world. His music was released in Europe by French record label Full Fridge and Italian underground label Unexplained Sounds Group. Saleh is currently touring his new album ‘A Ten year walk to the shore’.

‘Every now and then’: In this residency’s project Saleh takes a deep dive into the timeless question: What is time? exploring linear time, cyclical time, and the eternal now. The project examines perception, illusion, reality, and the frequencies that connect them within human consciousness.

Saleh also delves into the nature of memory: What are memories? Could they be the “now” repeating itself in different forms, with new faces and new terminology? He investigates repetition on a personal level, its echoes in human history, and the recurring series of events that feel new each time they loop.

Egypt > Switzerland | Music

Yunis is a composer and performer based between Kafr El-Dawar and Paris. His work moves between music and performance, drawing from ritual, trance, and collective memory. Blending Afro-Arab rhythms with experimental electronics, he creates immersive sonic worlds rooted in spiritual inquiry and communal transformation

‘Laghm: Choir of the Silent Brotherhood’: An experimental vocal project inspired by the near-forgotten Egyptian practice of Laghm—a breath-driven form of expression characterized by moans, sighs, and fragmented utterances. Drawing on this tradition, Yunis will begin with solo vocal research, investigating how its elements can be reimagined through electronics, repetition, and spatial composition.

Treating the voice as both memory and movement, the project uses breath as a central compositional force. Yunis seeks to reinterpret this embodied practice within contemporary sonic frameworks while preserving its raw emotional resonance.

Egypt > Switzerland | Multidisciplinary

Amro Zidan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Alexandria, Egypt, working across experimental sound, electronic music, and visual media. His practice blends field recordings, live improvisation, and conceptual sound design to explore space, memory, and human behavior. Through both solo and collaborative projects, he creates immersive, site-responsive audio-visual works that engage with cultural identity, perception, and acts of resistance. Each project carries its own distinct sonic and conceptual identity, reflecting his deep commitment to experimentation and context-specific creation.

“Between” is an open-ended, interdisciplinary project that explores the dynamic relationship between urban and natural soundscapes through field recordings, experimentation, and improvisation. It investigates contrasts and harmonies within and between sonic environments: nature and city, noise and silence, presence and absence, structure and spontaneity.

“Between” also draws on psychogeography and walking as creative methods for navigating space, while reflecting on resistance as a human behavior shaped by place. During his residency, Zidan will immerse himself in Switzerland’s diverse sonic environments—mountains, rivers, forests, and cities—capturing and transforming them into experimental compositions. These soundscapes will be explored in dialogue with those of Alexandria, Egypt, revealing emotional, spatial, and cultural resonances.

Algeria > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Hichem Merouche is an artist living and working between Algeria, Tunisia, and Greece. Merouche uses film, sound, print and found objects in association with external agents—be they institutional, natural, or social. In his multidisciplinary installations, he implicates personal stakes and relationships, with substantial transformations throughout their making. The Mediterranean is a recurring landscape in his work, where collective memory, contemporary politics, and personal aspirations converge both within the Algerian context and beyond.

Hichem traces his encounter and evolving dialogue with a plant growing on his maternal grandmother’s grave in Algeria, reflecting on the forces that shape their interaction. It touches on plant agency, spirituality in the digital age, and contemporary systems of legacy.

Through the ongoing care for this living organism—symbolizing a connection to his ancestor—the artist explores the nature of familial bonds in the aftermath of loss or departure.

The goal is to deepen this exploration, providing access to resources and key environments that support the investigation of the project’s core themes: artistic practices that engage with the living world while critically examining the ethical and spiritual frameworks within which art is conceived.

UAE > Switzerland | Visual Arts

UAE based Iranian artist, Mahshid Rafiei works in sculpture, installation and drawing. Her practice considers the processes through which material, language and image become so inextricable that they ossify projections of prejudiced imaginaries.

Rafiei’s work often involves transforming everyday objects and their constituent materials into compositions that inhabit the interstitial space between perception, recognition, and projection. During this residency, she will further elaborate on this approach, exploring emerging threads of inquiry within her practice. Through research, technical experimentation, and discursive engagement, she plans to develop both the conceptual and formal dimensions of a new work.

Morocco > Switzerland | Performing Arts

Mehdi Dahkan is a choreographer and performer based between Tangier and Lyon. Using the body and movement as his primary medium, he explores their socio-political implications and how art can serve as a means of resistance and communication. His practice often draws on Moroccan folk and ritual practices, reimagining them through contemporary choreographic approaches.

Breath is examined as a vocal and physical medium for generating movement, sound, and light within a choreographic framework. Inspired by Moroccan vocal traditions that use fundamental bodily functions to foster connection and ignite collective action, breath is treated as both a physical and symbolic act—inviting reflection on what connects us beyond language, culture, or ideology.

This work is part of a broader series investigating forms of protest and resistance movements that have given rise to artistic practices or rituals over time.

China > Switzerland | Literature

Based in Beijing. Li Yingdi is a writer working primarily in nonfiction while also exploring fiction. Her work centers on contemporary youth, mental states, and everyday life. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, The Runaways (2024), delves into the emotional and psychological worlds of young people. She is currently writing a novel about emotion and memory. Through both nonfiction and fiction, she explores the aesthetics of realism and the subtle inner experiences of modern individuals.

This project explores the contemporary relevance of ‘escape’ as both a literary theme and a social phenomenon by retracing the footsteps of Swiss writer Robert Walser. Combining textual analysis with social observation, she will reflect on Walser’s marginal perspective—his resistance to authority and quiet acts of self-preservation. In her own nonfiction writing, she has long focused on individuals living on the edges of society. Walser’s sensibility, particularly his belief in the need to ‘remain open’ while withdrawing, deeply resonates with today’s emotional landscape. Through this residency, Li hopes to connect his vision with the stories of modern-day ‘runaways.’

China > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Based in Beijing. Ma Haijiao works with documentary video, photography, video installations, text, and painting. His practice explores individuals’ perceptions of their surroundings and broader social and historical contexts. Long-term projects like ‘Image Biography Project Mr. Quan’ and ‘Landscape Project’ reflect themes of family and urban spectacle. In recent years, his work has increasingly touched on ‘geopolitics, plants and ecology’, developing a visual language that blends reality with poetic expression.

His residency project is titled Chemical Photographic Development: Swiss Mountain Landscapes and the Aesthetics of Chinese Ancient Landscape Painting. A remark once encountered in an article recalled how early Western viewers, upon first seeing traditional Chinese landscape paintings, asked, ‘Did ancient Chinese people all live in the mountains?’ While the answer is no, such paintings gave rise to a uniquely Chinese visual aesthetic. This project takes the mountain landscapes of Switzerland as visual subjects, integrating the aesthetic sensibility of Song and Yuan dynasty landscape painting to explore how visual spirituality emerges from geography. The planned process involves traditional photographic methods such as silver gelatin, cyanotype, and Polaroid, combined with Chinese ink painting techniques. The artist will also share the aesthetic concepts of classical Chinese landscape painting with local audiences.

China > Switzerland | Performance Art

Based in Shanghai. Wang Ximan is a performance artist active in China and Europe. Her creations have the core of a spirit of resistance, focusing on and exploring identity, gender fluidity, societal inequality, and disability… In her practice, she elaborates a live performance method that transcends media characteristics, using images, sounds, and installations to question the art medium and explore the relationship between space, body, and audience.

The artist will further explore the deconstruction of power, the core of resistance, identity in her previous works. This work employs a cross-media approach to transcend individual connections, delving into a broader collective consciousness within the interstices between distinct media forms. She seeks to comprehend the narratives surrounding local power structures and identity through exploratory roaming and observation within the environment.

China > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Based in Erdos. Xie Zongxiu is a visual artist whose practice engages with ecological feminism and post-humanist ethics. Through participatory formats and sensory materials, she explores the intricate entanglements between feminism, vegetarianism, and animal rights under modern patriarchal value structures. Her work examines cross-cultural narratives as sites of inquiry, tracing how ideas of sustainability, care, and the human-animal relationship are constructed, contested, and reimagined.

Her residency project aims to explore the cultural, ecological, and ethical dimensions of dairy and plant-based milk in Swiss and Chinese contexts. Grounded in ecological feminism, it focuses on the mediating role of microorganisms in fermentation, examining the complex relationships between humans, animals, and invisible life forms. During the residency, she plans to collaborate with local dairy producers, artists, and communities through sensory-based participatory formats to investigate how milk is transformed materially and symbolically. The project also addresses the ethical distance between humans and dairy animals in industrial systems. By juxtaposing Swiss dairy traditions with the water buffalo milk culture of Shunde and the pastoral milk practices of Inner Mongolia, it seeks to provoke cross-cultural reflection on sustainability, animal rights, and the possibilities of multi-species coexistence beyond anthropocentric frameworks.

China > Switzerland | Performance Art

Based in Suzhou and Shanghai. July (Yang Zhiyan), performance maker, member of _ao_ao_ing ensemble, and a picky foodie from Suzhou. Holding a belief in collaboration and cocreation, their practices usually take the forms of participatory performance and audio guided walk and action, reflecting on embodied daily experience with interests in the critical potential of food and liminal space created by sound.

‘When I eat, I am never alone. Food travels through my boundary and connects me, flesh to flesh, with the universe, extending the reach of my existence and transforming the singular “me” into the plural “we”.’

‘MWe are what mwe eat’ will be an artistic research to explore each of us beyond individual boundaries as a multitude, through the lens of food, in terms of being, becoming, and connecting. Working from their own encounter with food with a food diary, July will develop recipes and rituals for the f/actors that constitute and coexist with me/we, to be in the chiasm to challenge homocentrism with food magic.

Chile > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Adolfo Bimer is a visual artist. His work investigates the ways in which humans are represented by the medical sciences, emphasising how the institution of health and its systems of image production dehumanise us, while defining abstract perceptions of identity, health, illness, and the body. Through painting, objects and installation, the samples Bimer works with become images, data and objects all at once. 

For his project ‘The Endless Journey’, Chilean visual artist Adolfo Bimer draws on his personal experience with his mother. Having lived in Switzerland in her youth, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, prompting her return to Chile. She later developed a graphic practice influenced by her background in architecture. Her drawings, blending automatic writing and visual poetry, resemble formulas and maps, evoking aerial views of real and imagined landscapes. During his residency, Adolfo intends to explore mental illness and health as radical expansions of imagination, defying their conventional medical framing. He also aims to analyse key moments in Zurich’s cultural legacy: Dada’s Psychic Automatism, the Rorschach test, and Carl Jung’s Active Imagination. The goal is to research psychoanalysis, ecological aspects of contemporary medicine, and his personal biography to create a work fusing painting, drawing, and writing—producing “psychocartographic” maps. 

Argentina > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Andrea Fasani is a visual artist and performer. She taught ceramics between 1989-2019, opened her own studio in 1982, and had her first exhibition in 1969, at the age of 16, at Héctor Chioccini’s studio in Bahía Blanca. In 2006, she showed ‘30 (TREINTA)’ for the first time: a work-in-progress focused on the memory of those disappeared by Argentina’s military dictatorship. In 2007, she founded Buque Factoría, a visual and sound experimentation group.

Through a historical approach, Argentinian visual artist Andrea Fasani intends to look at the concept of memory as a process of collective construction; the constant action of not forgetting. Andrea’s work — which spans various media, such as installation, performance, and sculpture — deals with personal and social conflicts. During her residency in Switzerland, she aims to explore the history of a region and the community’s memory of it. The project seeks to trace the social dynamics of this space, drawing parallels with her city, Buenos Aires, and its history during the Argentine dictatorship. Later on, she wishes to produce a graphic novel based on her interaction with the locals (and her daily documentation) to examine how collective memory shapes social identities across different historical contexts. 

Brazil > Switzerland | Performance

Antonio Gonzaga Amador is a visual artist and educator, with an interest in performance programmes that reflect on the body and its transdisciplinary studies. Currently he coordinates mediation at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio). 

Jandir Jr. is a visual artist and educator who develops artistic practices centred on text. In recent years, he has sent messages to strangers and shared these experiences in exhibitions, independent publications, books, and newspapers.

The Brazilian performance duo proposes to continue their research around their project ‘Amador e Jr. Segurança Patrimonial Ltda’ (Amador and Jr. Property Security Ltd), which they have been developing since 2015. The series of performances consists of both artists dressing as security officials in institutions such as museums. By inserting their own racialized bodies in those contexts, they discuss the classes and race relations that exist in the art system. The proposals benefit from the invisibility and ambivalence that the racialised performers, in cheap uniforms, bring to the galleries – many people don’t see the performance happening or ask them questions like directions to the bathroom. During their residency, they aim to expand those questions within a European context and to investigate an immigrant body in working. 

Bolivia/Chile > Switzerland | Music

Ariel Bustamante is an artist, apprentice, and passenger of the Collasuyo deserts. Born in Chile and currently based in La Paz, Bolivia, his work is dedicated to the acoustic and spiritual technologies of air, conversation, and the relational processes of sound. His life-work project centres on collaboration, manual work, and a long-term commitment to the land, beings, and skies he lives with and under.

Based on his experience in developing creative methods for transhuman communication at the intersections of sound, memory, and ecology, Chilian-born artist Ariel Bustamante proposes a project exploring human-llama oral practices in Switzerland — where llamas, taken from the Andes during the colonial era, have lived since the 18th century. As an artist living and working in the Bolivian Andes, Ariel aims to explore the cosmological conditions, present existence, and ancestral memories of llamas in Switzerland, using both spiritual and contemporary audio technologies. In collaboration with llama keepers in Zurich’s Marthalen, Mönchaltorf, and Höri regions, he intends to create an ethnographic sound-art documentary. The source material would include interviews with caretakers, recordings of transhumance activities, and the vocalizations humans use to communicate with llamas – drawing on ancient and contemporary rituals and practices. 

Ecuador > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Diego Ledesma García is an Ecuadorian visual artist and educator whose practice is situated at the intersection between the arts, education, and ethnography. His approach is defined by the search for the affections and memories that are deposited in the landscape, where education becomes a questioning action while memory becomes a space for collective dialogue. 

An artist with roots in the cacao landscapes of Montalvo, Ecuador, where his family comes from, Diego Ledesma García proposes to explore the hidden ties between the cacao fields in his home country and the chocolate production in Switzerland. For his project ‘Cacao Ghosts: Echoes in the Landscapes’, he seeks to uncover the ‘ghosts’ of cacao — the lingering traces of memory, labour, and ecological transformation — that persist in these places. By bridging these distant yet interconnected sites, he aims to create a dialogue that reflects on how cacao has shaped cultures, economies, and identities across continents, while also honouring his personal and family ties with this narrative. Finally, he plans to develop an audiovisual installation that weaves together archival materials, photographs, and sound recordings from both regions. 

Bolivia > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Iván Cáceres is an architect and artist living in La Paz, Bolivia. Focusing on the investigation of architecture and emerging art from different contemporary philosophies, he creates worlds saturated with psychological unrealities based on dreams, devoid of narrative context. He presents deviations of the mind from audiovisual supports of multiple formats and assumes the ground as a radical observation of a territory. 

For some time, Bolivian artist Iván Cáceres has been building a framework of research and creation around dreams and languages lost in time. In his work, dreams serve to reorder memories, they are the particles that make up our experience, generating rhythmic body movements. Therefore, sleep would be a way to deal with the overload of information — the essence of dreams is the incongruity and discontinuity of time. Iván looks into finding spaces that affect and build territories, in transmitting and receiving knowledge from the substance that is confronting the dream in a context of reality. For his project ‘Mastering silences (The consciousness of architecture through dreams)’, he intends to continue this investigation and, by collecting people’s experiences, create a machine that makes silences in dreams — through visual and sound formats and topographic observations. 

Brazil > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Mayana Redin is a Brazilian artist, researcher, and professor of Visual Arts at UFMG (University of Minas Gerais). Her work revolves around the cosmogonic, technical and artefactual imaginaries of humanity. She mainly uses three-dimensional forms and the dialogue between image and sculpture to create scenes, installations, and objects. In recent years, she has been investigating the relationship between cosmic imagination and its material orientation in space. 

Looking at the Sun as an eyewitness to human history, artist Mayana Redin bases her project on iconographies of the star through time: as a provider and destroyer of planetary life, responsible not only for life and its association with light, but also for its potential dark violence. For her residency ‘Weird Suns’, she aims to produce sculptural works based on observing the star in its dialectical mode of existence and meaning for human life, working with dichotomies such as light/darkness, clarity/blindness, order/turbulence. Considering solar activity as a prerequisite for the restriction of visibility, during the residency she would like to carry out an iconographic investigation (in Swiss archives, museums, and libraries) that use the Sun as an object associated with darkness and strangeness.

Peru > Switzerland | Photography

Prin Rodríguez is a Peruvian photographer whose work explores identity and family legacy through experimental and sensory narratives that intertwine individual and collective memory. Her images often blur the line between reality and fantasy, whether through constructed narratives based on real events or through visual strategies that shift the viewer’s perception. She is co-founder of the Pariacaca collective, which led the preservation project Archivo Harawi: 50 Years of Visual Anthropology in Cusco. 

Stories and oral narratives have always accompanied Peruvian photographer Prin Rodríguez and led her to connect with the myths and stories surrounding the sacred spaces of her country. For her project ‘Willakuy’ (a Quechua word associated with the act of oral storytelling), she proposes to explore the links between the myths and legends of the Andes and Switzerland. She would like to delve into Swiss narratives to deepen her research on the ties between family and collective memory, as well as forms of orality, and the deep relationship with images. Prin also aims to study neuroscience and changing technologies related to images, such as the use of LiDAR, to reflect on the constant connection between images, symbolism, and the act of storytelling as a means for the perpetuation of memory. 

India > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Madhukar Mucharla is a Hyderabad-based visual artist working primarily with leather, found objects, and natural pigments. His practice is rooted in Dalit history and identity, and he explores themes of caste, labor, and social memory through experimental techniques inspired by traditional leather craft and puppetry. He uses materiality as a way to tell stories, challenging ideas of purity, dignity, and representation through everyday symbols and lived experience.

During this residency, Madhukar Mucharla proposes to research Swiss labor movements, craft traditions, and working-class histories. In India, leather is a stigmatized material connected to caste-based occupations and Dalit identity. He wishes to understand what leather means in Switzerland, how local communities, craftsmen, and artists view and work with it. By visiting museums, archives, and meeting historians, activists, and cultural workers, he will explore how labour, identity, and material histories are connected in Swiss society.

Bangladesh > Switzerland | Visual Arts

Pulak K. Sarkar is an interdisciplinary artist based in Dhaka. His practice spans painting, site-specific installation, and performance. He explores power dynamics, structural relationships, and the construction of meaning that shapes society. His work fosters cultural dialogue and intellectual engagement, often challenging conventional boundaries. He also sees his work as a form of social commentary that pushes the limits of perception and invites a broader understanding of art’s role in shaping and reflecting society.

Pulak K. Sarkar’s project explores the cultural and architectural concept of liminality by examining the spaces between the transient and the permanent. Focusing on the slums of Sat-Tola and Korail in Bangladesh and the bunkers of Switzerland, it compares two environments that originated as temporary responses to crisis but have since become permanent fixtures. Though shaped by different socio-political contexts, both spaces reflect resilience, survival, and the complex negotiation between state and identity. By analysing these liminal structures, the research investigates how nations construct identity in response to crisis and how such spaces reveal an evolving national identity.

Sri Lanka > Switzerland | Performing Arts

Umeshi Rajeendra is a performing artist and choreographer working at the intersection of dance, performance, and interdisciplinary movement practices rooted in global south perspectives. Her work explores rhythm and flow as forms of embodied resistance—drawing on cross-disciplinary inquiry to navigate histories of fragmentation, ecological entanglement, and the politics of belonging. Through choreographic research, improvisation, and community engagement, she challenges fixed identities and activates new relational possibilities across bodies, cultures, and landscapes.

During the residency, Umeshi Rajeendra will deepen her choreographic and performance research by exploring the question: How can rhythm and movement reframe local and diasporic (dis)connection as an evolving, relational force—one that holds tension yet opens pathways for transformation? Informed by her mixed heritage and intercultural practice, as well as her performative projects, she will engage in site-responsive movement, improvisation, and community-based listening. The residency will serve as a generative pause to challenge fixed identities and forge new relational pathways—laying the foundation for a long-term transnational project bridging Sri Lanka and Switzerland through embodied performance inquiry and the future development of new work.

South Africa > Switzerland | Performing arts

Grouping and Ungrouping Forever is an artistic partnership comprising South African artists Andi Colombo and Naledi Majola, formed in 2019. They work in the discipline of performing arts. This partnership’s primary interest is in performance-making methodologies and so, their praxis consists of interdisciplinary explorations of performance-making, including freewriting, movement improvisations, and Viewpoints. Since 2022, they have been working from a distance with Andi based in Cape Town and Naledi in Berlin.

For their project ‘Are you ready? Are you ready? It’s Chorus Time’, the duo investigates the notion of ‘Choruscore’, a term they coined for the essential ingredients of theatrical chorus, including repetition, multi-layering, multi-voice text creation, and the presence of multiple perspectives in one body. Their research explores how to sustain cross-border collaboration, using the internet, performance, and media art as a vehicle, and creating a virtual chorus. In this work, the chorus is the site of research. It is a sometimes unified, sometimes self-contradicting body made up of singular parts. Through the project, the artists ask: ‘How much can the internet hold our ideas and make space for collaboration, and when does it fail us? How can the chorus be a model for inclusiveness and how can we use it to reach the audience too, allowing them to join us in chorus?’

Ghana > Switzerland | Multidisciplinary

Percy Nii Nortey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kumasi, Ghana. His work explores identity, labour, and materiality, blurring the lines between installation, performative objects, and moving sculpture. Rooted in personal history and Ghana’s socio-economic conditions, his practice seeks to decolonise minds, empower Black communities, and reclaim agency over their narrative. Percy engages the local proletariat in his creative process through projects that repurpose second-hand fabrics — distributing them, collecting them after use, and transforming them into artworks — to highlight the significance of labour and its role in society.

‘Threads of Dependency’ is a research-based project that explores the historical and postcolonial ties between Switzerland and Ghana’s textile trade. The artist investigates how Swiss companies, particularly during and after the colonial period, shaped Ghana’s fabric market — impacting design trends, economic dependency, and cultural identity. The project focuses on the shift from traditional Ghanaian textiles to imported wax prints featuring European motifs. Through engagement with archival materials and research institutions in Switzerland, Percy will trace these legacies and develop works that respond to the enduring effects of colonial influence. The project aims to encourage dialogue around material culture, labour histories, and the ongoing impact of global trade systems on local industries.

Uganda > Switzerland | Multidisciplinary

Wakabi Anorld is a Ugandan multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges art, costume design, installation, sculpture, and sustainable innovation. With an interest in materiality and environmental storytelling, since 2019 Wakabi has been reimagining the creative potential of discarded materials — from denim to plastic waste — transforming them into compelling visual art and functional designs. Over the past five years, he has developed a distinctive style rooted in recycling, upcycling, cultural identity, and community engagement. 

Maganda Shakul is known for his unique fusion of music production, percussions, recycling, upcycling, field recordings and fashion design. Traditional Ugandan percussion is the foundation for Maganda’s musical exploration, which draws inspiration from his diverse cultural heritage. The artist’s distinctive approach to music production blends traditional elements with contemporary sounds, creating a harmonious synthesis of past and present. Beyond music, Maganda’s creative vision extends to the world of fashion, where he crafts designs that serve as visual expressions of cultural narratives and memories.

‘EcoSonic’ is an exploration of sound and visual textures by the two Ugandan artists. Using discarded materials from local bars, clubs, public parks and urban soundscape in Switzerland, the artists aim to create immersive installations that merge recycled materials, field recordings, and indigenous Ugandan rhythms, unveiling the hidden potential of waste through art.

Switzerland > Jordan | Visual Arts

Based between Basel and Valais, Alex Ghandour works through installations, images, rhythms, and scripts. Their pieces unfold like films without cameras — blending tension, repetition and fragile setups. They orchestrate scenes where gestures, textures and affects hold just long enough before slipping away. Ghandour’s practice flirts with dramaturgy, but never fully settles, inviting poetic intensity through presence, silence, and unstable durations.

‘Undercurrents of Silence: The Materiality of Memory’: Ghandour will spiral into the writing of some kind of moving image not to explain, not to reconstruct, but to work with the narrative forces released by the fracture. Ghandour is drawn to the excesses of absence, where too much is missing, and therefore something begins: a surplus of meaning, a pressure to imagine. This is not about solving the gaps, but inhabiting them, using cinematic and sculptural strategies to explore how memory, fiction, and matter collide and coexist. Ghandour works through rhythm, spatial cuts, and visual dissonance — the residue of something almost said.

Switzerland > Egypt | Design

Amanda Haas Abd el Halim is a Swiss-Egyptian graphic designer, educator, embodiment guide, urban researcher, and writer. As Studio Amanda Haas in Berlin, and Basel, they create full scope identities, books and visualisations. Through the interdisciplinary research and publishing practice School of Observation, they collaborate with the artist Giacomo Santiago Rogado on more experimental projects, including process-oriented design, art editions and embodiment enactments. Her critical writing is grounded in research and experimentation, transcending disciplinary boundaries.

‘Rest as Resistance: Reimagining Wor(l)ds’: In the context of larger urban areas, rest and stillness can represent a quiet form of resistance to the relentless pace of life. This resistance then translates into an active form of recovery and an act of defiance against the surrounding environment. In this urban context, dreaming and imagination serve as regenerative practices that challenge exploitative neoliberal narratives of productivity. Through storytelling, dialogue and embodied reflection, this research looks at how personal and collective histories can provide new perspectives and ways to resist the demands of our time. Haas’s research explores ways to document everyday resting and reimagination practices in writing and through visualisation in collaboration with local artistic practices and craftspeople.

Switzerland > Tunisia | Visual Arts

Anaïs Wenger is a Geneva-based artist working mostly across performance, writing, installation. Her practice often begins with language and unfolds through gestures of displacement of form, voice, or context. Collaboration plays a central role in her work, which seeks to challenge fixed authorship and explore open modes of narration. Through shifting formats and temporalities, she develops pieces that question how meaning circulates, fragments, and reconfigures itself in shared spaces.

‘MONNOM’: At the heart of every narrative lies a name; the one we give to things, beings, and places. Yet some stories resist naming altogether, slipping instead into gesture, silence, or image. Here, her work begins in that space of uncertainty: how is a body written?

This project explores three intertwined forms of inscription: biological, administrative, and gestural. Not to trace a fixed origin, but to question the narratives that pass through us. Each phase examines a different layer: genetic imprint, bureaucratic archive, and everyday gesture, weaving a shifting cartography of transmission, erasure, and reinvention. Through different modes of learning, documentation, and collaboration, Wenger will search for structures able to hold contradiction, detour, and drift, and to suggest, in their gaps, other ways of naming and telling.

Switzerland > Morocco | Music

Born in France, Anouck Genthon is a violinist based in Geneva. She anchors her work in the development of her own language through the experience of sound and listening. She likes to engage in transversal forms of research, and she plays in various contexts at the crossroads of improvised, experimental, contemporary, electroacoustic and traditional music through projects ranging from solo to large ensemble. Her work is published by Sbire records, Wide Ear Records, Newwaveofjazz, Another Timbre, Confront Recordings, Pan y rosas discos, UN-Rec, Insub. Records, Le petit label, Thödol, Gamut Edition. She is the author of ‘Fictation’ (Gamut, 2020) and ‘Tuareg Music. From political symbolism to aesthetic singularization’ (L’Harmattan, 2012).

‘Aẓǝl – From Ethnomusicology to Musical Creation’: Genthon will be furthering her research project titled aẓǝl in Morocco. Stemming from her ethnomusicological research on Tuareg music in Niger and Algeria, aẓǝl emerged as a solo violin piece which reinterprets these traditions from the artist’s unique perspective. Aẓǝl draws on personal archives, translating memories into musical form. Genthon aims to expand this artistic research across the Maghreb and Sahel. Building on early exposure to Moroccan Arab-Andalusian music, the artist seeks to rediscover these repertoires, focusing on heterophony, by engaging with local musicians.

Switzerland > Algeria | Visual Arts

Swiss visual artist Oriane Emery lives and works in Lausanne. She is originally from Algeria, a geocultural space that shapes her artistic practice through questions of identity and legacy. Oriane Emery is developing a transdisciplinary and multiform practice, particularly through the links she forges between the performing arts and the visual arts. Through intimate narratives borrowing from fiction, and through both theoretical and political writings, she experiences and explores the notion of métissage. Her works include, but are not limited to, performance, video and installation.

‘Un trait d’union : a multicultural identity marked by colonial history’: This residency project in Algeria is rooted in a critical reappropriation of postcolonial memories, exploring the connections between the family history of Oriane Emery and the still-lingering traces of the colonial past in Algerian society. Through archival research, the collection of oral histories, and collaborations with artisans and local residents, the artist questions the construction of a mixed identity and the often-invisible forms of transmission. Her transdisciplinary approach—blending video, writing, and installation—aims to open a space for dialogue between the intimate and the political, memory and creation, within a decolonial perspective that embraces the tensions of the in-between to reveal its strength.

Switzerland > Tunisia l Music

Philipp Eden is a Basel-based musician and sound artist working in experimental and improvised music. His practice explores the inter-play between instrument, environment, and listening, approaching sound as a dynamic process shaped by space, perception, philosophical reflection, and collective creation. He has collaborated with numerous musicians and worked on interdisciplinary projects, performing at venues and festivals across Europe. In addition to his artistic work, he organizes concerts and teaches piano at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB).

Marina Tantanozi is a Greek Swiss-based flutist, improviser and composer, working in various settings based on improvised music practises and Sound Art. She creates open-end compositions, using improvisation and field recordings both as a research process and compositional elements. Active in various artistic, educational and curatorial contexts, she has collaborated with numerous musicians and collectives and performed in major festivals. In 2024 she was awarded the Árvore grant.

‘Sounding Hospitality’ is a collaborative sound project, exploring hospitality through field recordings, interviews, and collaborations with local artists. Drawing on personal ties—Eden’s family history in Tunis and both musicians’ Balkan roots—the project examines how hospitality shapes social and artistic life in the region. The collected material will form the basis for a collaborative installative work and a text documentation. The project is part of a broader artistic exchange with Vienna based visual artists Irena Eden and Stijn Lernout, who have developed several works on the Maghreb, the Mediterranean, and themes of migration and hospitality. With this collaboration, the aim to build on existing research while offering fresh perspectives on contemporary contexts. Future presentations in Switzerland will extend hospitality through shared artistic experiences with Maghreb based artists.

Switzerland > China | Visual Arts

Chloé Delarue is a visual artist based in Geneva. Her work explores computational logics that reconfigure our perceptual regimes. Since 2015, her ongoing cycle TAFAA for Toward A Fully Automated Appearance has investigated a world of unstable, spectral appearances. Using a wide range of materials and aesthetic strategies, TAFAA functions as a critical simulator of presence, revealing tensions between image and body, illusion and trace, seduction and disappearance.

The proposed residency project in Hangzhou explores the tension between ancestral knowledge and technological acceleration. Delarue aims to investigate the city’s dual identity—rooted in cultural tradition while also emerging as a major center for AI and technological innovation. Drawing on the concept of cosmotechnics developed by Yuk Hui, the research seeks to rethink Western technological paradigms. The artist also wishes to pursue a formal investigation into organic forms specific to the local landscape, exploring their potential for transformation and reactivation through contemporary reproduction techniques. This approach engages a reflection on impermanence and the aesthetics of decay in the age of generative technologies.

Switzerland > China | Music, Architecture, Performing Arts

Based in Zurich and Geneva, work as a duo. Yeshe Gao (sellyourmania) is a Swiss-Chinese DJ, musician, and architect. Her interdisciplinary approach to sound and space engages with themes of intuition and structure, memory and fiction. Fhunyue Gao (F月 G) is a Swiss-Chinese artist active in the fields of performing arts and music. Her work often explores melancholic, surrealist states where time and social space blur, using performance, music, and visuals to express the undefined.

‘Grieving the Silence’ is a research project that aims to explore the reemergence of musical practices in Shanghai post-Cultural Revolution, retracing the memories of sound: presence, loss, and sonic creation. Rapid urbanisation constantly reshapes memory signifiers. Residents are challenged by vanishing presents and forgotten futures, while the diaspora struggles to reconnect. This project examines shifting urban memories, identifying discrepancies and continuities to reshape sonic narratives, and observing the city’s dynamic musical evolution and its role in constructing memory.

Switzerland > China | Visual Arts

Based in Basel. Kaspar Ludwig merges functionality and metaphor, turning everyday objects into poetic resistance. His sculptures and installations expose labor’s absurdity and tradition’s weight through anarchic wit. A marble bench induces seasickness; a brass pillow rejects comfort, reframing rest as defiance. Blending Italian craftsmanship with conceptual rigor, his work inhabits the space between utility and futility, where objects rebel against their roles. Ludwig unravels power structures through subtle sabotage, making the familiar strangely subversive.

In our era of compulsive production, Ludwig examines why we create. He explores creation’s deeper necessity through Jingdezhen’s monumental ceramics, where collective labor transforms clay into a cultural legacy, and Nanjing’s paper cutting traditions. These ancient crafts embody an antidote to contemporary excess: slow, intentional making that connects material, maker, and meaning. By apprenticing with master artisans, he will document the choreography of collaborative creation, where skilled hands negotiate shared visions. The resulting works will hybridize these time-tested approaches with contemporary practice, proposing an alternative to our culture of disposable objects. This is not nostalgia, but a vital inquiry into sustainable modes of making.

Switzerland > China | Dance

Based in Geneva. Marco Berrettini started dancing in the 70’s, first in Discotheques and Ballroom schools, then at The Place in London and the Folkwangschule in Essen Germany. He worked as a contemporary dancer in Paris at the end of the 80s and as a choreographer. Since then, he has choreographed around 60 dance pieces in various countries. Besides dance, he is interested in writing, making music and anthropology.

His project is a mix of choreography and anthropology. He would like to learn about Chinese traditional dance, learn the steps, and gain an understanding of its historical context. He would like to present the folk dances he has learned and exchange ideas about dance and its connections to society, politics, and history in meetings with local artists. He’d like to explore: What is the relationship between folk dancers and cultural appropriation? How do they explain the origin of their dances and how their culture was created? What does the world do to dance, and what does dance do to the world? He will also explore opportunities for co-creating works with local artists, such as new dance works that he could bring back to Switzerland.

Switzerland > China | Performing arts

Based in Basel. Natascha Moschini is a choreographer and performer whose work explores the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of the human body. She investigates how social power structures are inscribed in and expressed through the body. Her practice—rooted in somatic exploration, spatial intervention, and conceptual research—develops choreographic and dramaturgical forms that critically reflect on the body’s role in society.

UNDINE is an interdisciplinary research project that explores the myth of the water spirit Undine from the Upper Rhine region. Combining archival research with embodied practice, the project investigates how myths shape human connections to water and how, conversely, our relationship with water influences these myths. Moschini examines how local folklore, economic activities, and environmental transformations affect both bodies of water and the communities that depend on them. Blending storytelling, performance, and site-specific inquiry, UNDINE reflects on water’s profound capacity to sustain or end life, prompting deeper consideration of our collective responsibility to protect and nurture aquatic environments.

In Macao, Moschini investigates the worship of the mythological sea goddess Mazu, while in Shanghai, she examines the transformation of traditional water towns. What were once practical spaces for travel and transport have increasingly shifted toward tourism, raising essential questions about the cultural and ecological implications of these changes.

Switzerland > Brazil | Visual Arts

Deborah-Joyce Holman’s practice is concerned with the relationship between popular visual cultures, capital and the intertwined politics of representation. Holman contrasts the exploitative potential of how images collide with capital with approaches of artistic and cinematic subversion, repetition and refusal using differing approaches across media such as video and painting.

A muti-disciplinary artist interested in the relationship between race, gender and their stakes in aesthetic regimes, Deborah-Joyce Holman proposes to conduct research into Brazilian modernist architecture and to seek exchange with Brazilian members of the African diaspora. During the residency in Brazil, titled ‘Modernist architecture + stakes in Brazilian national identity’, they intend to gain a better understanding of aesthetic regimes in architectural, filmic, photographic, and painterly representations as they testify of notions of placelessness, belonging and identity in relation to Afro-Brazilian experiences. Deborah-Joyce (also a member of the African diaspora) is particularly interested in understanding the similarities and differences between Brazilian modernisms and those they know of in Ghana. 

Switzerland > Colombia | Visual Arts

Gina Proenza is a Colombian-born visual artist who lives and works in Lausanne. Her work weaves micro and macro histories together like a collection, crafting narratives between distant geographical locations and desynchronised stories to explore some collective memories. With the conviction that whispered dialogues, unseen correspondences or mixed heritages can revolutionise outlooks and points of view, she plays humorously with the use of words to questions the relations of power tied to language and its modes of knowledge. 

Visual artist Gina Proenza draws on her Colombian roots for her project ‘Hors du spectacle / Out of the Show’. She recalls the story of a female monkey who tried to adopt her in the Darién Forest of Colombia when she was a child, while also exploring the term Abya Yala, used to name the American continent by native populations since 1992, after the impulsion of the Guna Dule, a native community living also in the Darién region. During her residency in Colombia, she would like to pursue her work on language (a central motif of her practice) as a tool of power, focusing specifically on how places and territories are named. In the country, she also intends to expand her artistic network in the local arts scene and broaden her investigation through meetings and interviews with local researchers. 

Switzerland > Argentina | Music

Jonathan Frigeri is a sound/radio artist, performer, and researcher, or in a less conventional definition, he is a spelunker artist and psychic engineer working between art and technology. He attempts to use technology with a lo-fi approach to reveal critical thought through a poetic scent. He pushes the boundaries and limits of a possible reality to see and hear behind the curtains.

Jonathan Frigeri’s activity as a sound and radio artist has been exploring the ritualistic aspects of art dissemination and reception. Both ritual and radio, he explains, have the power to engage the unconscious mind, transcending everyday time and space. Rituals often incorporate symbols and gestures that resonate within the psyche, affecting emotions and perceptions beyond rational comprehension. With this in mind, Jonathan founded, in 2020, the International Institute of Research on Radio and Magic, dedicated to exploring imaginative solutions at the intersection of technology and magic. He intends to continue this investigation in Argentina (a place of memory linked to his grandfather, who emigrated to Buenos Aires in his youth), delving into traditional rituals and modern occult movements. The goal is to blend elements of experimental music, sound art, performance, expanded theatre, and ritual: a journey between the fantastic tale and the scientific experience in order to establish a rite and offer listeners an experience between hypnosis and magic. 

Switzerland > Colombia | Visual Arts

Lucas Herzig was born in Zurich and grew up in Ticino in a multilingual Colombian-German family. He often reflects on the complexity of identity. His work is based on a sense of disorientation, which he transforms into hybrid, inclusive narratives. His artistic practice revolves around sculpture, through which he critically questions his central interests — stories and objects. Working predominantly with inexpensive, accessible and unconventional materials, he reinvents everyday objects. 

The work of Lucas Herzig centres on sculpture, a medium through which he explores his primary interests: stories and objects. The artist often works with simple materials and found objects, reflecting on value and belonging and seeking ambiguous situations that defy categorization. For his residency in Colombia (a country his family has roots in), he intends to explore traditional craftsmanship from the Llanos Orientales region, learning from Maestro Avelino Moreno about instrument-making and working with materials like leather, horns, and totumo (a local fruit). Inspired by archaeology, he seeks to collect found objects to examine history and environmental change, then create sculptures using ‘dung-mâché’ (a variation of papier-mâché using cow dung). Also, he’s interested in hosting workshops on papermaking.

Switzerland > Brazil | Architecture

Myriam Uzor is an architect specialising in conversion projects and landscape design. Teaching at ETH Zurich, she conducts research on the choreographic dimensions of architecture, cities, and gardens. She believes in a bodily approach as the foundation of spatial experience. As part of the group Annexe, Myriam is curator of the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2025. 

Leopold Strobl is an architect living and working in Zurich. Growing up in Vienna, he later studied architecture in Paris and at ETH Zurich. In various collaborations, his works focusses on sustainable construction methods, always starting from what is already there. An ongoing series of projects is dedicated to self-build as a research method, where design and construction go hand in hand. 

As architects, Myriam Uzor and Leopold Strobl are interested in how human interactions shape a project and its development. For their residency ‘How much Space can Time create’, they intend to focus more intensely on analogue and dynamic methodologies, by attuning to the rhythms of Bahia, Brazil, its territory and history. They’re specially interested in the work of Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi, who realized many projects in Salvador de Bahia (Centro Histórico de Salvador de Bahia, Proyecto Barroquinha, Centro Cultural Casa do Benin, Ladeira da Misericórdia) and was profoundly influenced by the local cultural mix. The duo aims to investigate how culture and landscape inspired her work (as well as that of other architects), her playful engagement with local, West African influences combined with a strong sense of constructive detail. 

Switzerland > Argentina | Literature

Pierre Fankhauser is a writer and translator born in Lausanne (Switzerland). He is a professor at the Swiss Literary Institute and an independent literary coach with À vrai dire. After living for seven years in Buenos Aires, he published ‘Sirius’, ‘Bergstamm’ and four translations: ‘Veneno and Ruptures’, novels by Argentine author Ariel Bermani, as well as ‘Abécédaire’ and ‘De rue en rue’, collections by Chilean poet Pablo Jofré. 

Writer Pierre Fankhauser discovered Buddhism at Furaibo, a temple nestled in the heart of Buenos Aires, whose energy has transformed his way of seeing the world. For over five years, he passed through its doors several times a week, taking part in practices and retreats, like the Million Mantras ritual. For his residency in Argentina, he aims to develop his novel ‘One Million Mantras’, a text that explores the inner path to spirituality. The project draws on the grammar of Buenos Aires — the texture of its sidewalks, the rhythm of its passersby, the unique light of its streets — to bring three cultures into dialogue: Argentine, Swiss, and Japanese. The book seeks to explore these ‘elsewheres,’ united by a common thread: the practice of the mantra. 

Switzerland > Pakistan | Design

Alex Amir Khan is a designer, artist, and researcher working between Switzerland, Mexico, and Brazil. At the intersection of visual arts, design, traditional crafts, and historical inquiry, he adopts a holistic, colonial power structures–dismantling and intersectional approach rooted in cross-cultural collaboration. Since 2013, natural latex has driven his practice; from 2022 onward, he innovatively fuses latex with textiles, organic fibers, dyes, and biomaterials through community co-creation, notably co-founding the HeveaHub initiative in 2025.

Alex Amir Khan will investigate the artisanal heritage of football manufacturing in Sialkot, focusing on the renowned hand‑stitched construction and the natural rubber core. As a queer individual, he will critically examine how hegemonic notions of masculinity are constructed, performed, and valorized through football. Drawing on his material research into natural latex in Mexico and Brazil, he will create a multidisciplinary body of work reimagining the football as a catalyst for cultural exchange. By juxtaposing grassroots craftsmanship with FIFA’s institutional history in Switzerland, the project will interrogate masculinity and illuminate the nuanced connections and intimate resonances between material, identity, sport.

Switzerland > Vietnam | Literature

Dorian Nguyen Phu is an artist and author who explores a wide range of narrative and visual forms to talk about the world around us. Accessible to audiences of all ages and infused with humor and poetry, his work highlights the importance of creative freedom and self-discovery.

Guided by a deep sense of observation, Rosalie Gross uses brushes and colors to explore the paradoxes and beauties of the world around us. Through stories and images, she seeks to express both harshness and wonder with humility and care -questioning creation as a shared resource and a universal language.

Dorian Nguyen Phu’s autobiographical graphic novel explores the journey of a contemporary Swiss sibling group born to a Vietnamese father and a Swiss mother. Through the lens of cultural identity, migration, and family memory, the project blends intimate storytelling with broader historical echoes, forming a narrative of mixed heritage, resilience, and belonging, rooted in both personal experience and universal themes.

Rosalie Gross finds a time of immersion to set the creation of graphic novel pages in motion and to tell stories through images, featuring faces, food, wildlife, plants, social symbols — from North to South, coastal mangroves to mountain landscapes.

Switzerland > Vietnam | Design

Based in Geneva, Thị Hoàng Thư Nguyễn is a textile designer specialising in hand felting and knitting. Her passion for ancient techniques and intricate patterns fuels her creative process, leading to innovative designs that blend tradition with a contemporary edge. Through handcrafted fashion, she aims to inspire and create meaningful connections across cultures and generations.

‘Woven Bridges: Merging Tradition and Innovation in a Research Textile Collaboration’ explores the connections and stories that Vietnamese people share through their rich textile traditions. With Vietnamese roots and a fashion background from Switzerland, the artist aims to delve into how techniques such as weaving, embroidery, and tie-dye are preserved and passed down through generations. By living with local communities, she will exchange knowledge and collaborate with fabric makers, blending traditional craftsmanship with contemporary design. The outcome will be documented research and textile designs that celebrate cultural heritage while fostering a unique and meaningful dialogue between past and present.

Switzerland > Namibia | Visual art

Denise Bertschi is an artist and scholar, based in Zürich, Switzerland. Her research is located at the intersection of visual culture, urban studies, and history. She critically investigates not only archives, but landscapes or the built environment on their extractive and colonial entanglement related to Switzerland’s role in extra-European expansion and it’s longue-durée into the present. Her artistic and academic work takes the form of publications, film-installations, or textiles and raises questions around cultural myths, such as Swiss neutrality or coloniality.

‘Accompanying my parents’ first voyage to Africa became the underlaying narrative of an unfinished film. A retired Swiss physicist, who flew Swiss middle-class tourists over Southern Africa as a Cessna pilot, introduced exclusively “white-owned” spaces in Namibia. Over fenced-off land, traveling by air is highly privileged, which produces a one-sided gaze on a geopolitically and historically fragmented territory marked by apartheid, colonialism and resistance. He led us to hyper-wealthy landowners, luxury tourism lodges in German hands located on former warzones during the genocide in the beginning of the 20th century, to a Swiss-owned zinc mine in the desert, and a hunters’ lodge where Americans hunt for trophies.’ 

Denise’s video project sets out to explore how to tell a counter narrative to this problematic white gaze on space and time, centering polyphonic contemporary and ancestral Black knowledge.

Switzerland > Ghana | Visual art

Dominique Lanz is a visual artist and textile designer currently based in London, UK and Zurich, Switzerland. Her subjects are inextricably linked to her primary medium of textiles: Repulsion and desire, excess, obsession with materials and the intertwining of artificial matter and nature. She looks at things that we cast off as disposable and tries to illuminate the surreal in the seemingly every day.

In her recent work ‘I was around your house when you weren’t there’, Domonique conceptually incorporated the concept of online shopping into the project, where the sense of touch is irrelevant and it is characterised by immateriality, imagination and comfort. Her starting point for the work was to connect the rubbish that washes up in relatively moderate quantities on the banks of the Thames River in London with the mountains of textile waste that pile up on the coast in Accra, Ghana. Her residency is therefore an important next step to develop her work on site and engage with different approaches to textile waste through initiatives run by the Kokrobitey Institute as well as local traditional textile printing techniques.

Switzerland > Mozambique | Music

Lausanne-based vocalist and composer Sylvie Klijn explores the space between language and sound. With roots in classical piano, she studied jazz vocals and composition, focusing on Brazilian influences and poetic text settings. Her music transforms literature into layered, intimate soundscapes. Intrigued by cultural exchange, she embraces the unfamiliar as a creative engine. Currently, she researches how to integrate keys and effects pedals into her music, weaving new textures into her evolving practice of sonic storytelling.

‘Kuebelela’, which means ‘to sing’ in the Chope language, is a collaborative artistic reproject that Sylvie will pursue with Mozambican musician Matchume Zango. Taking place at the Nzango Artist Residency in Maputo, the project explores the fusion of traditional Mozambican music — especially Chopi rhythms and instruments like timbila, mbira, and xitende — with contemporary global music practices. The project will focus on the celebration of female protagonists in the interpretation of traditional songs. Sylvie will experiment with effects pedals and keys to look for ways to create a musical dialogue between ancestral African sounds and modern Western techniques. This project is not only a space for cultural preservation and innovation but also a meaningful exchange between the music scenes of Mozambique and Switzerland.