Tunisia / Algeria > Switzerland | Literature

Abir Gasmi & Kamal Zakour

Abir Gasmi is a Tunis-based writer working across graphic novels, animation, and film, as well as a cultural practitioner. Her work projects Arab cultural heritage into the future through a feminine lens, weaving together speculative fiction, mythology, ecology, and questions of identity. Through visual storytelling, she explores how Arab futurism can reclaim cultural memory while imagining new narratives and futures rooted in the region’s own imaginaries. 

Kamal Zakour is a Tunis-based Algerian comics artist and illustrator. Working in a clear-line aesthetic enriched by expressive and experimental approaches, he creates immersive visual universes inspired by North African cultural heritage, desert landscapes, and evolving visual identities. His practice brings atmosphere and world-building to the forefront, crafting images where Arab heritage and speculative futures converge. 

Terra Marcia: Sâd ص

For their residency, Abir and Kamal intend to connect with the Swiss comic scene and develop the second volume of their graphic novel Terra Marcia, an Arab-futurist graphic novel trilogy blending spiritual science fiction and dystopia. Set in a barren land where fertility has become a distant memory, it follows the struggle between the Company, a technological empire promising survival through absolute control, and the Sect, a mystical resistance safeguarding an ancient knowledge of the living world. Through this conflict, the project explores ecology, power, memory, and the future of humanity, framing the universal tension between domination and emancipation, erasure and transmission, nihilism and hope. Visually, Terra Marcia reimagines the language of comics by weaving together calligraphy, speculative cartography, and Islamic iconography, creating a richly immersive universe where image carries memory as much as narrative. During their stay, the duo also wishes to present and discuss their work in progress, contributing to the exchange of ideas between the cultural scenes of Switzerland and North Africa. 

Egypt > Switzerland | Visual arts

Aya Sabry © Omnia Sabry

Aya Sabry is based in Cairo, Egypt, and works as an artist across installation, sculpture and performance. She explores the cultural memory and colonial narratives embedded in natural textiles and fibres, specifically cotton and linen. Looking through her matrilineal family history and official records, her subject matter revolves around unpaid labour, gender inequality and the relationship between body, gender and identity. She has experimented with fibre sculptures, natural dyes — such as hibiscus, onion shells and madder root —, natural printing (using dye flowers and metal mordants), mono printing, performance, drawing, and painting. 

Aya Sabry, Unwrapping Tales; The Fertile Womb. Printing, drawing, and embroidery on cotton and linen fabric; cotton thread. Installation view at Al Riwaq Art Space, Bahrain, 2024.

Her residency project follows textile labour, colonial trade routes and the invisible bodies that sustained textile industries across Egypt and Switzerland. Working across archival research and studio production, Aya looks to bring Egypt’s cotton industry into direct conversation with Switzerland’s embroidery and linen heritage of St. Gallen and the lost silk industry of Zurich, two geographies connected by colonial trade networks that have rarely been examined together. Through engagement with the Textilmuseum St. Gallen and the Swiss National Museum’s textile archives, alongside material experiments with locally sourced natural dyes from the region, the project proposes to question not only which workers get remembered and which disappear, but whether one geography’s disappearance was the condition of the other’s prosperity. 

Tunisia > Switzerland | Visual arts

Hela Lamine © Sélim Gribaa

Hela Lamine is a Tunisian multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her practice takes the form of installations, interactive performances, artist books, walks, virtual reality experiences, ceramics, and publications. Through research-based investigations, archival work, and collaborations with the scientific community, she explores the connections between memory, transmission, and the living world. In recent years, her research has focused on forms of non-human communication, particularly those of trees, examining the capacities of ecosystems for resistance, adaptation, and cooperation in the face of climate change. 

Archéologie du présent, plaster, 2026 © Hela Lamine

During the residency, Hela aims to explore the possibility of ecological solidarity between forests facing different stages of climate change. Inspired by recent scientific research on tree communication and assisted migration, the project imagines a dialogue between Tunisian oak forests, already adapted to drought and extreme heat, and Swiss forests increasingly exposed to these conditions. Combining artistic research with exchanges with scientists, foresters, and local knowledge holders, the project investigates how knowledge circulates across species, territories, and generations. Through this speculative framework, it raises questions about resilience, interdependence, memory, and adaptation in a changing climate. Rather than illustrating scientific findings, the research seeks to create a space where scientific knowledge, ecological imagination, and cultural narratives can meet and inform one another. 

Palestine > Switzerland | Visual arts

Izz Al Jabari © Dalia Jacobs

Izz Al Jabari is an artist, curator, and researcher based in Hebron, working with photographic archives and the textures of memory. His practice begins inside collections of images and objects that are left behind, asking what they still carry and how they might be read again. Moving between embroidery, installation, and archival research, he treats the archive as something alive, a material through which a community keeps returning to its own image. 

Before the Poem — Installation, 2026 © Izz Aljabari

For his residency, the artist aims to expand a dialogue with the Swiss cultural scene around photographic archives, colonial memory, and the ethics of institutional custodianship. The project centres on the Rawhi Abu Hammad Studio Archive, whose photographs span three successive eras and trace the marks that time has left on the same faces. The focus is less the archive as document than what it can give back a way of returning memory to people. In Switzerland, Izz intends to be in dialogue with curators, practitioners, and institutions facing the same questions. During his stay, the artist intends to read these images slowly and represent them as living matter rather than institutional record, attending to what the frame could not hold: the wound, the unsaid, what was pushed out of view. He questions how an archive might let a community read itself again, and how memory, once tended this way, begins to mend. 

Algeria > Switzerland | Music

Mustapha Benmansour

Mustapha Benmansour is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Tlemcen, Algeria. He develops a practice combining electronic music, live performance and sound research. Through synthesizers, acoustic instruments and field recordings, he creates immersive listening experiences and explores rhythm, trance, and the power of sound to shape our perception. 

Mustapha Benmansour © Rahim Laiouer

Through electronic composition, sound experimentation and live performance, the project What Triggers Trance? aims to investigate how rhythm, repetition, intensity and spatial sound can shape perception and induce altered states of listening. Drawing from North African musical traditions as well as contemporary experimental practices, Mustapha wishes to work with synthesizers, acoustic instruments and field recordings to develop new sound pieces and performance formats. The residency and the Swiss experimental scene would provide a context to deepen this research and explore how sound can create immersive experiences that connect bodily sensation, memory and collective listening. During his stay, the artist intends to connect with the local community through open studios, listening sessions, and live experiments where he can share his creative process. 

Lebanon > Switzerland | Visual arts

Raymond Gemayel

Raymond Gemayel is an artist based between Beirut and Marseille. He enjoys dipping his body in chlorinated waters and toxic seas. If he had to describe his practice in a drawing and describe this drawing, he would tell you about a triangle, with angles of language, body and territory. In this triangle, water is floating. He uses installation, painting, drawing, photography, video, found object, text, sound to trace and retrace this triangle. 

untitled, 2026 © louïse lett

The project looks at Swiss watersheds as pre-linguistic structures. In Switzerland, four rivers flow toward four seas, and linguistic regions follow those basins. Rhône toward French, Rhine toward German, Ticino toward Italian, and the partial Danube basin toward the fragmented zones where Romansh persists. As Raymond describes it, language moves like water: along valleys, through separations, before becoming identity. For his residency, the artist proposes a research period of listening to the landscape and its inhabitants, tracing how movement and settlement have historically followed the shape of valleys and ridges, and how language emerges from the territory before it becomes discourse, before it becomes a word. 

Egypt > Switzerland | Performing arts

Zainab Magdy © Ebti

Zainab Magdy is a writer, performance and visual artist, as well as an academic and translator from Giza, Egypt. She has worked in theatre and performance since 2008 and worked in feminist storytelling collectives between 2011 and 2016; she has also acted in independent films. She wrote, directed and performed her debut, Ordinary People, between 2016 and 2018. In 2025, Zainab began working on her performance project Disappearing Cartographies in Green. She writes non-fiction, fiction, performance and theatre pieces. Her creative work centres around personal narratives, archives, space, and memory.  

But What About the Trees 0.01. Performed at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, June 2025 © Maurine Tric / ADAGP, Paris, 2025.

By engaging with the Swiss performing arts scene and feminist collectives, Zeinab proposes to further develop her performance text تحت الحوض — What’s Beneath the Sink, a documentary narrative around endometriosis — in Arabic, the word حوض means both ‘sink’ & ‘pelvis’, a metaphor of the unseen nature of domestic space & chronic illness. The work touches on diagnosis as a process, not only in the medical sense, but also as an exposure of social and patriarchal narratives about women’s bodies, access to information, and means of pain management. The artist focuses on the personal to explore a dual trajectory of time: the history of this disease versus the ‘waiting time’ for a diagnosis. During her stay, the writer intends to interact with works by Swiss artists on ‘the invisible body’, bridging connections with an Egyptian feminist perspective on medical trauma. 

Beijing > Switzerland | Performing arts

Gu Jiani © Chang Xiao

Gu Jiani has long been interested in the flow and transformation of force. Her artistic practice unfolds across body, sound, space, and objects, constructing relational fields of dynamic interaction through interdisciplinary performance. Within her work, performance becomes a way of observing how existence is shaped. Through creation, she continues to open up possibilities for connection, imagination, and lived experience. In 2016, she founded Untitled Group（十口无团）.

Alongside her artistic practice, Gu has continuously researched and developed embodied methodologies. Through long-term experimentation and practice, she has expanded her perceptual awareness while gradually developing a series of training methods that explore the relationship between body and consciousness. Over the past decade, these methods have evolved into an open and continuously growing path of research. In 2025, she founded Physical Force Field, an experimental platform dedicated to the intersection of body and consciousness, inviting researchers from different embodied practices to work together.

Gu Jiani, Transition, 2022 © Zhu Lin

For this residency, Gu will travel to Zurich carrying an ongoing curiosity: How does our life exist through dynamic relationships? She hopes to enter an unfamiliar cultural environment, engage with local artists and communities, and explore questions such as: How do people live with their own life experiences? How are the experiences they choose connected to their lives? What inspires local artists to create? How does their artistic practice interact with the environment in which they live?

She hopes these questions will become the starting point of her research, allowing her to observe how her embodied practice and artistic work continue to grow in a different cultural context. During the residency, she also hopes to experience Switzerland’s natural landscapes, exploring how different terrains, rhythms, and spaces influence bodily experience. Through this process, she hopes to loosen the habits and relatively stable creative structures that have developed through years of working in a high-pressure environment.

Taipei > Switzerland | Visual arts

Shih Wei-Chieh

Shih Wei-Chieh is a solar maker, e-textile artist, and innovator whose practice connects craft, open science, and visual art. His project, 1,540,000nm of DSSC, simplifies the fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells, making photovoltaic technology more accessible. Working across e-textile wearables, textile dyeing, and experimental lithography, he translates contemporary technologies into tactile and visual art.

Shih Wei-Chieh, 1,540,000nm of DSSC Appropriate Solar RAVE

During his residency, Shih Wei-Chieh plans to further develop his solar glass sculptures with Sitterwerk, a craft and material research center, and EPFL, where key innovations in dye-sensitized solar cell technology first emerged. By bringing photovoltaic semiconductor technology into craft-based making, he explores the use of DSSC as a physical unclonable function (PUF): a data security system that uses defects in the semiconductor layer of silicon chips to generate unique and strong tokens for identity verification, rather than traditional digital passwords. This means that every DIY solar glass cell can be electrically reproducible while still distinguishable from other cells. On top of that, he wishes to research a speculative energy internet and its future economy.

Beijing > Switzerland | Visual arts

Song Ziwei

Song Ziwei is a Beijing-based conceptual artist. Her practice explores the relationship between labor, creativity, and social structures, often using everyday objects to reframe familiar experiences and social relationships. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in how creative practitioners sustain their artistic practice under economic pressure and how artistic practice can continue to evolve within changing social conditions.

Song Ziwei, Echo Valley, Water-based spray, LED, Arduino, re-lay, variable dimensions, 2025 © the artist

During her residency in Switzerland, Song Ziwei will explore the idea of the artist’s ‘double life,’ focusing on how artists sustain their practice under economic pressure. Through this research, she seeks to examine a broader question: as traditional art systems become less able to support artistic production, how do artists reorganize their working methods, communities, and economic models?

She plans to visit emerging artists’ studios, artist-run spaces, self-organized initiatives, and creative communities, engaging in conversations and observations to learn how different artistic ecosystems support sustainable practice beyond the traditional art market.

She is also interested in whether Switzerland has forms of artist-led initiatives comparable to the artist-run markets and self-organized creative platforms that have emerged in China in recent years.

Shanghai > Switzerland | Performing arts

Wei Man and Wang Jiaming are Shanghai-based educators and performance makers, co-founders of Corbie & Rabbit Art Centre and Media × Performance Studio. Using the body as a guiding thread, they have spent more than a decade capturing the vitality of the individual through education and depicting diverse bodily narratives through creation. They are deeply concerned with the personal histories and imprints of the times condensed within the body, viewing it as a fluid living archive—creating a space for self-care and rediscovery that activates and responds to life experiences sedimented within the body.

Wei Man and Wang Jiaming, Participatory Theatre, Let It Flow Let It Go ©️ Hu Yifan

Continuing their exploration of embodied concerns, they approach the body as a micro-lens to observe how individual identities are shaped by Switzerland’s multicultural society and, in turn, actively contribute to shaping its social fabric—bringing an intercultural perspective to life experiences.

During the residency, they plan to use the Body Portraits micro-documentaries as a medium to connect with local diverse communities and individuals, inviting participants to discover the complexities and creativity latent within their bodies. They will also visit body-based creators, transdisciplinary artists, and art educational institutions, documenting different embodied experiences and aspirations, as well as their resonances and tensions with Switzerland’s multilayered cultural contexts.

Argentina > Switzerland | Literature

Ariel Dilon © Daniel Caselli

Ariel Dilon is a prolific literary translator from French, English and, more recently, Romansch. He also lectures in creative writing and is the author of numerous essays, a collection of short stories, and the novel Hemisferio noche (Night Hemisphere), published in 2025.

Books translated by Ariel Dilon

For his project, he will be working with Disgust, a bi-lingual monologue by Swiss author and performer Flurina Badel, written both in English and in the Romansch dialect Vallader. The way in which these two languages alternate and ‘compete’ transforms the voice of the text into a battlefield. Ariel will attempt a trilingual translation — or rather a rewriting. That is, a target text that does not aim for absolute equivalence in the relative weight of the two source languages, but rather a recreation that takes them up and doses them differently, allowing them to be ‘heard’ to a certain extent, and which, so to speak, ‘accompanies’ the struggle between English and Vallader by using Spanish as a mediating or organising language. For this, he intends to immerse himself in the Romansch context, working with Flurina and other Swiss authors.

Argentina > Switzerland | Visual arts

Florencia Rodríguez Giles

Florencia Rodríguez Giles is a visual artist and co-director of Club CAOs, a platform dedicated to artistic, educational and community-based research into art and mental health in La Plata, Argentina. Her work explores the links between contemporary art and therapeutic processes through drawing, installation, video, performance and experimental educational initiatives. Her works, which often unfold as dreamlike, collective worlds, propose new forms of coexistence and sensory perception, both within art institutions and in unconventional contexts linked to health, education, and the community.

In Hydrogamies: Toward an Imaginal Sensorium, the artist proposes a research on Lake Geneva through immersion, flotation, and underwater listening practices that activate imagination as a wet technology. Expanding on her previous works with marine waters, she aims to further develop an ongoing investigation into liquid environments, approaching them not only as metaphors but also as material and active forces. The project aims to destabilise normative body schemas and explore perceptual reorganisation in resonance with the lake’s biogeophysical dynamics.

The residency should begin with a phase of personal practices in the lake and its surroundings. From these experiences, Florencia would develop written protocols, drawings, diagrams, and simple elements — masks, portable objects, and props. Then, the artist intends to share some of these practices with fellow residents and local interlocutors, generating temporary communities of exploration.

Brazil > Switzerland | Literature

Leo Felipe © Ivi Maiga Bugrimenko

Leo Felipe is a writer whose practice combines literature, cultural criticism, and curating. He is interested in collective forms of aesthetic experience and in dissident expressions and their processes of capture. Often employing humour and experimental techniques such as cut-ups, his writing combines elements of essay, biography, and fiction. He is the author of a sex shop de drugs & food (Quadradocirculo, 2023), História universal do after [Universal History of the Afterparty] (nunc, 2019) — translated into Spanish and published in Argentina by Caja Negra in 2022 — and A fantástica fábrica [The Fantastic Factory] (Pubblicato, 2014).

a sex shop of drugs & food, an installation by Leo Felipe based on his novel of the same title, presented at the group exhibition Be My Brother or I Kill You (São Paulo, 2025). The installation featured copies of the book chained inside a restroom and available for public reading © Samuel Esteves

Interested in European urban centres as historical sites of exile for Brazilian artists, Leo Felipe intends to investigate the Swiss context (its political neutrality and history of underground movements and autonomous cultural spaces) to develop his literary project Rato (Rat), a story set in the 1970s, amidst the political radicalisation and countercultural behavioural revolution that unfolded after 1968.

The narrative follows a Brazilian artist who leaves the armed resistance and flees to Europe under mysterious circumstances. Travelling through communes, alternative art and music scenes, and underground networks spanning different countries, he crosses paths with exiled South American artists and activists, whilst attempting to escape a past that continues to haunt him. Blending fiction, experimental writing, historical research and political imagination, the work examines the limits of counterculture as a collective project of emancipation. During his residency, the author aims to conduct archival research and engage with the local cultural scene through visits, conversations, and exchanges.

Brazil > Switzerland | Visual arts

Natalie Braido © Ana Pigoss

Natalie Braido investigates the concept of time through technologies, mechanisms, and materials that address impermanence and the limits of materiality. Her practice considers both the biological and symbolic aspects of nature, combining ephemeral and everyday materials to create systems that explore the poetics of mutability, instability, and failure.

Lard wall (2018), by Natalie Braido — lard arranged in the form of a wall, columns fall forming different designs, variable dimensions

During her residency, Natalie intends to develop sculptural systems driven by thermal gradients. Titled Walls of Air / Thermal Memory, the project builds on earlier works incorporating aerogel and nitinol. Aerogel functions as a ‘wall of air’: an ultralight solid made mostly of air that slows heat transfer, while nitinol behaves as a thermal motor, translating temperature differences into mechanical movement. Coming from a tropical context, the artist seeks to work in a climate where heat is not given, but produced, retained, and protected. Through sculptural tests, she will investigate how these materials respond to local climatic conditions and climate-control infrastructures, examining how apparently stable environments are sustained through energy and technical mediation. Climate-control processes will become both the material and operating condition of the sculptures, making visible the relation between insulation, energy, and movement.

Colombia > Switzerland | Visual arts

Rosario López © Mateo Perez

Rosario López is a visual artist seduced by landscape and territory, challenged by materiality and the creator of impossible dialogues. Using photography as her artistic and documentary basis and starting point, she establishes connections between art, everyday life, nature, and the collective activities of the past and present. Her vision translates into an aesthetic vocabulary expressed in a variety of biomaterials, transformed through sculptural techniques, ceramics, and textiles. Monumental soft sculptures, almost ethereal metallic lace, and embroidered blankets reveal an inexhaustible curiosity in which craftsmanship is mixed with genuine curiosity to create hybrid objects that raise questions while winking knowingly at the viewer. For some time now, the artist has embarked on a transdisciplinary approach that has led her to explore the traces of Colombia’s pre-Hispanic past and the living legacy of indigenous communities with whom she has established dialogues, workshops, and collaborations.

Repliegues de la Memoria (2015), by Rosario López © Oscar Monsalve/Archivo de Bogota

The project Fictions of Clay challenges what material culture designates as ‘false’ and assumes to be ‘true’. It begins by studying fake pre-Hispanic ceramics that passed as originals in museums around the world. During her residency, Rosario aims to track down these pieces in Switzerland in order to study them from a decolonial perspective and to create an exhibition of hybrid objects that bring together artistic vision, rigorous scientific data, and the imagination that gives rise to construction of a fictional ‘Amazon bestiary’. The first phase of this project will be on view at the NC Arte Gallery in Bogotá from June through August 2026.

Bolivia > Switzerland | Music

Tatiana López Churata © Daniel Leguizamon

Tatiana López Churata is an artist, performer and researcher. Her work lies at the intersection of indigenous Andean music, contemporary creation and material practices such as ceramics. Inspired by the many layers that coexist in La Paz, she develops artworks, research projects, and collective actions that bring living traditions, experimentation, and contemporary ways of inhabiting the territory into dialogue.

Respiración Sajra (Sajra Respiration) is a research and creation project exploring the idea of the Sajra in the Andean Carnival as a state of instability, transformation, and temporary disruption of the everyday order. Far from a folkloric representation of this entity, the project aims to investigate how to translate these fluctuations into a contemporary sonic and spatial experience. Using sound recording of wind and breathing, and a structure composed of resonant ceramic plates, the research develops an immersive installation in which sound, matter, and space interact as a single system.

The result should be a performative work accompanied by a sound and material archive documenting the process. Immersed in the Swiss context, Tatiana looks to interact with a strong ecosystem for interdisciplinary research and for the intersection of art, sound, and technology. At the same time, she aims to contribute with situated frameworks of thought and practice that question the relationship between territory, sound, and matter from a non-Western perspective.

India > Switzerland | Visual arts

Akshay Mahajan © Kapil Das

Akshay Mahajan is an artist based in Goa, working in photography, collage and archival research. He treats the image as a mirror to culture and collective memory, reading postcolonial cities and landscapes anchored in pre-colonial memory to surface their failed futures. He layers found pictures, captions and cloth onto the photograph, keeping its sources visible, so the classifications an archive naturalises can be read against the grain.

Akshay Mahajan, ‚People of Clay (Behula and Lakhamindra)‘, 2025

Beginning with the historic movement of cotton between Indian and Swiss trading houses, this research-led residency project traces connections between textiles, trade and systems of classification across time and geography. Books, archival images and material experiments are brought together through association rather than fixed categories. Colour charts, industrial photographs, storage labels and art-historical images are arranged into atlas-like plates, with their captions and sources kept visible. Mahajan will also produce dye tests on cloth and paper, exploring stain, repetition and type. The project will culminate in a counter-archive of thirty to forty plates and a public studio talk.

Nepal > Switzerland | Visual arts

Jagdish Moktan © Deniz Bedir

Jagdish Moktan is an artist from Ramechhap, based in Bhaktapur. His practice explores the intersections of personal history, collective memory, and nuances of migration. Working across multiple mediums, Jagdish Moktan approaches migration not simply as a physical journey but as an emotional and psychological state, one marked by memory, distance, and an in-between sense of being. He is also co-founder of Aakrit, an artist collective based in Bhaktapur, Nepal.

Through this residency, Jagdish Moktan will undertake an artistic inquiry in the landscape of Pizol Glacier in Switzerland, declared lost in 2019. Beginning with a place where a glacier no longer exists, the research asks what remains when a landscape is irrevocably transformed. Through conversations with local communities, researchers, and field recordings, Jagdish Moktan will explore how environmental change shapes memory, everyday life, and relationships.

India > Switzerland | Visual arts

Poonam Jain © Daniel Rodríguez

Grounded in archival and field research, Poonam Jain’s practice investigates how linguistic and numerical systems organise knowledge, memory, value, and power. Working across media, she traces the entanglements of pedagogy, economy, and language through acts of measuring, counting, and standardisation. Moving between intimate histories and institutional structures, her work unfolds how seemingly ordinary systems of learning, exchange, and record-keeping shape lived experience.

From the series ‘Degrees of Exclusion of Languages and Scripts’, 2025. 3D printed letterpress moDi lipi types. Implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under the Arts Practice programme, with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.

Poonam Jain will develop the next phase of her ongoing project, Degrees of Exclusion of Languages and Scripts, during the residency. The opportunity to engage with histories of printing that extend between Europe and South Asia offers an important context for her to think through the movement of scripts, technologies, and systems of knowledge across colonial networks. Through this work, she seeks to examine how language is shaped by the conditions through which it is produced, circulated, and remembered, and how these continue to determine what is preserved, forgotten, or rendered invisible through the everyday acts of reading, writing, and memorising.

Ghana > Switzerland | Visual arts

Fatric Bewong © Isaac Gyamfi Assumeng

Fatric Bewong is an interdisciplinary artist based in Accra, Ghana. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, collage, performance, photography, and socially engaged art. Working with discarded textiles, paper waste, and found objects, she explores memory, care, labour, identity, and ecology through processes of repair, weaving, and assemblage. Her recent work incorporates AI as a creative tool, expanding ideas of experimentation, participation, authorship, and collective imagination.

‚Whispers Woven Between Our Hands (mum and I), 2018-2025 © Isaac Gyamfi Assumeng

Fatric’s residency will deepen her investigation into care as a process of material transformation, building on her established practice of transforming textile remnants through weaving, stitching, braiding, binding, and assembly. Her work explores textiles as carriers of memory, labour, and social relationships, asking how materials continue to evolve through cycles of repair, protection, alteration, and renewal. During the residency, Fatric intends to expand her ongoing material experiments while working with locally sourced textiles and engaging with textile specialists, researchers, and industry partners. Through collaborative exchange and systematic experimentation, she looks to develop new material languages that connect hand-based practices with contemporary textile production. The research will culminate in experimental textile works that explore how artistic practice can reimagine the relationship between materials, making, and care.

South Africa > Switzerland | Music

Sanele Ngubane

Sanele Ngubane is a Johannesburg-based sound artist, award-winning producer, musician, and biodynamic farmer. Drawing from biodynamic thought, his musical practice values rhythm, listening, and liminal processes, treating compositions as sovereign ecologies built to outlast their sowers. His work includes collaborations with musicians, film scores and sound contributions to exhibitions. He also currently heads Sabusa Records, a Gqom-focused label and artist development agency.

During the three-month residency, Sanele will develop Resonant Structures, a new body of work in non-functional electronic composition investigating rhythm, texture, and space as formal devices. The project treats sound as spatial material: voices, synthetic textures, and silence held in relation to duration, proximity, and absence. The project builds on an existing Swiss–South African exchange with Geneva-based practitioners Dumbanengue initiated in 2023 during tandem research trips in Geneva and Johannesburg. The residency sets out to consolidate this collaboration through sustained studio work and dialogue with local artists. The project will culminate in a public listening session in Geneva, with the finished work later circulating in South Africa, extending a long-term relationship between independent sound communities in both countries.

Kenya > Switzerland | Visual arts

Wallace Juma

Wallace Juma is a visual artist and researcher based in Nairobi/Kajiado, Kenya. His practice explores human values, ecological systems, and the relationship between communities and their environments. Through research-driven, interdisciplinary approaches, he examines environmental change, resource stewardship, and human–nature interactions. His work takes the form of mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations that invite reflection on ecological resilience and our shared responsibility toward the natural world.

‚Formations‘, chemical resin, found cow bones, dry grass, soil and pebbles © Wallace Juma

During the residency, Wallace will expand his project How to Scare Birds, a research-based project exploring ecology, food sovereignty, and political expression through the symbolism of the scarecrow. Inspired by his experience as a small-scale farmer in Kenya, the project investigates how agricultural practices reflect broader relationships between land, governance, and community resilience. In Switzerland, he will engage with farmers, environmental researchers, and artists to examine local approaches to crop protection, sustainable agriculture, and ecological stewardship. Through field research, dialogue, photography, and collaborations, Wallace aims to compare rural experiences across both contexts while exploring how symbols of protection, visibility, and exclusion operate culturally. The residency will contribute to an ongoing body of work connecting environmental responsibility, agriculture, and social narratives across borders.

Switzerland > Algeria | Visual arts

Caroline Ann Baur © John Patrick Walder

Caroline Ann Baur lives and works in Zurich. Her artistic practice spans sound art, installation, and collaborative formats, with a focus on creating social spaces, exploring active listening, and examining the gendered valuation and devaluation of labour and symbolism. She co-founded the Zurich off-space Raum*Station, where she developed collective practices over four years. She has a journalistic and artistic writing practice. Since 2021, she has been a research and teaching associate in the master’s programme in Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). 

Natural yodeling and prayer — sound performance by Vanessà Heer and Caroline Ann Baur on Appenzell folk culture, Klang Moor Schopfe 2025 © Nicholas Schaerer

Her residency project examines the figure of Echo — Arabic ṣadā (صدى) — as a conceptual figure of the capitalist unconscious in the context of colonial and postcolonial conditions in the Arab context. Drawing on Marx’s concept of the commodity and Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the echo as a non-sovereign articulation, the project explores how colonial violence, feminised labour, and economic abstraction reverberate in materiality, language, and memory. During the residency, Caroline will search for acoustic traces, hold talks, and write fragmentary texts that interweave theory with local experiences. 

Switzerland > Egypt | Literature

Marina Galli © Joel Sames Wolfgang Trimmel © Uni Basel

Marina Galli is a literary translator and historian. In her work, she engages with the ‘Other’ through language(s): How is something expressed, what does that reveal about us, and how can we recreate a literary voice through the artistic practice of translation? The liminal space between languages shows how language shapes our perception, and how translation can, in turn, enrich our thinking with new impulses and concepts. 

Wolfgang Trimmel is a researcher, language teacher, and translator focusing on modern Arabic language and contemporary Arabic literature. He is interested in how literary translations shape perceptions of the Arab world and how they enable readers to build empathy and change perspective. For him, the practice of literary translation is an opportunity to engage closely and attentively with the source text, while allowing creative experimentation with different possibilities of expression in the target language. 

As a translation duo, Marina Galli and Wolfgang Trimmel aim to dedicate their residency to exploring the polyphonic comics scene in the Arab world. To them, translating means engaging deeply with texts and entering into dialogue with their authors. They see literary translation as an artistic practice that requires not only linguistic intuition, creativity and accuracy, but also extensive research and a thorough knowledge of a text’s specific contexts. The residency provides the time and opportunity to conduct this research, build networks, and gain firsthand insights into the Arab comic scene. In their work, they deal with questions such as: How can an artistic voice resonate in another language? And how can they, as a translation duo, contribute to making Arab comics more accessible to a German speaking audience? 

Switzerland > Egypt | Literature

Samira Belorf © Si-yü Steuber

Samira Belorf lives and works as an illustrator and comic artist in Basel. In her works as well as in commissions for clients, she addresses topics such as colonialism, racism and migration through visual storytelling. Another important element in her work is her love of music. Samira is a founding member of the Comic Crew BL/BS and advocates for greater visibility of the 9th art. 

2 Cultures © Samira Belorf

During her residency, Samira wishes to further develop her connection with the Arab comics and illustration scene (she participated in the CairoComix Festival in 2025) and develop her comic project, 2 Cultures – an autobiographical comic: The spectacular three-day wedding of Naima’s uncle in Morocco is coming up. Accompanied by her best friend, she visits for the celebration. Many of the old-fashioned wedding traditions are viewed critically by the two young women. While Naima has been confronted with them since childhood, for her best friend it is a culture shock. But the real shock is yet to come, namely when Naima and her brother discover a well-kept family secret. Growing up in a family with a Moroccan father, a Swiss mother, a younger brother, and a huge extended family, the comic 2 Cultures explores what it means to grow up between two countries. The story depicts the balancing act amid Christianity and Islam, superstition, and expectations, while focusing on the search for one’s own identity. 

Switzerland > Egypt | Visual arts

Sébastien Schnyder © Sébastien Schnyder

Sébastien Schnyder is a visual artist based between Bassecourt, Geneva, and Lyon. His practice, unfolding through sculpture and video, examines the material and symbolic frameworks that structure contemporary environments. Informed by field research and social sciences, he reconfigures objects and architectures to reveal systems of control, conceiving these works as material hypotheses open to critical projection. 

Au commencement était la fin, 2025, video 2K colours © Sébastien Schnyder

During his residency, Sébastien will develop the project ‘The Summit of Utopias, which takes place in Cairo and explores rooftop terraces as reclaimed urban spaces where discarded objects and informal uses generate situated narratives. Through encounters with residents, collected materials are transformed into hybrid forms and reintroduced so their functions can be collectively redefined. The project extends into a film blending documentary and speculative fiction, linking everyday interactions with objects to rooftop satellite dishes and the global media flows they receive. It examines the circulations between objects, spaces, and imaginaries. 

Switzerland > Hong Kong | Music

Severin Dornier © Arda Yurdusev

Severin Dornier is a composer and artist based in Bern, working across music theatre, sound installation, and media art. Combining his background as a composer with the mindset of an engineer, he builds instrument designs, kinetic sound sculptures, and robotic systems for interdisciplinary performances that bring together historical research and speculative fiction through sound. His work is rooted in the relationship between nature and technology and explores how art can propose future scenarios, utopian or dystopian, to reflect on the present.

Severin Dornier, Nautilus, Sound sculpture from the audiovisual performance Argonautica, 2025, IRCAM Paris © the artist

Metropolitan Mangroves is a research residency exploring Hong Kong’s entanglement of ecology and technology. Inspired by contrasting environments like the mangrove forests at the city’s edges and the busy market streets of Sham Shui Po, the project investigates two interconnected threads: the history of radio and electronics manufacturing, one of the starting points of Hong Kong’s growth into a major urban center, and the ecological pressures the city faces today through rapid urban expansion and coastal transformation. The residency focuses on prototyping a sound installation built from recycled and circuit-bent consumer electronics and inspired by mangrove biology, that transmits live recordings from Hong Kong’s nature into an urban gallery context. This ‚mangrove nature radio‘ could function both as a listening installation and as a broadcasting device for local artists.

Switzerland > Chongqing | Visual arts

Elisa Storelli © Nadja Krüger

Elisa Storelli’s artistic work is dedicated to observing how views on the phenomenon of time change and how this concept interacts with social structures; she named the research Chronomorphology. Her interest lies in studying how time has been measured and calculated, how aspects such as perceptions, feelings, biology and languages influence it. She researches how the idea of time developed through the centuries and among various cultures. The findings are processed into works of art in different media and presented as sensual experiences.

!NEON!!!

During her stay, she plans to work and research toward an installation that captures some of the connection between ancient Chinese and contemporary scientific research about the origin of the cosmos. The starting point is mountains: near the sky, sacred, imminent, they host observatories on their peaks and quantum physics labs in their depth. What do mountains tell us about humanity, the stars, and the origins of the Universe? The work will creatively associate the Big Bang of the modern scientific cosmogony with traditional Chinese ideas about the origins of Heaven and Earth, by drifting toward animistic and transcendent ideas of sacred mountains.

Switzerland > Shanghai | Visual Arts

Giorgia Piffaretti © Nicolle Aïcha Bussien

Giorgia Piffaretti is a multimedia artist based in Mendrisio and Amsterdam. Through video, installation and lecture performance, her research-based practice focuses on how systemic oppression surfaces in everyday as images, gestures and elements in public spaces.
Drawing on queer-feminist methodologies of listening, slowness and trust-based encounters, she weaves observation, conversations and anecdotes into playful speculative docu-fictions that question dominant narratives and open space for collective discussion.

La Regionale – Mostra d’arte della Svizzera italiana. Museo Casorella, Locarno, 2026. A cura di ACXSI. Foto: Cosimo Filippini

Buona Fortune is a research-based project exploring how cultural imaginaries shape landscapes through the circulation of plants. It focuses on Trachycarpus fortunei, a palm linked to 19th-century botanical circulation between China and Europe, within a broader history of trade relations, botanical collecting, and European desires for exotic landscapes.

Today, the palm is invasive in Ticino (Swiss-Italian Canton), where it threatens local biodiversity; since 2024, Trachycarpus fortunei has been subject to circulation restrictions, while remaining an iconic image in postcards and regional advertising. During the residency, the project will investigate the palm’s movement across geographies and meanings, reflecting on exoticism, ecological transformation, and the afterlives of botanical circulation, developing observational and speculative narrative material for a multimedia installation.

Switzerland > Chengdu | Visual arts

Richard Blaško © Dani Pochetti

Richard Blaško is a Zurich-based visual artist working primarily in video installation, performance, and photography. His practice investigates how belief, care, and labor become embedded in everyday rituals and infrastructures, translating these into immersive environments. Combining documentary observation with subtle formal intervention, he creates participatory situations that oscillate between fact and myth-making, inviting viewers into states of ambiguity, intimacy, and reflection rather than fixed meaning.

Richard Blaško, Tireme su © Richard Blaško

During his residency in Chengdu, he would like to examine fortune practices and how their labor is delegated, commissioned, or purchased through class and buying power, positioning prayer as a service where presence becomes optional. Is luck even his if it was not created by personal means?

Taikoo Li serves as just one architectural example of global luxury retail borrowing sacred language, interweaving devotion and transaction, and blending the borders of the sacral and the commercial. While in residence at A4, he would like to investigate who bears the labor behind prosperity, and whether luck is ever truly personal or always the residue of unseen work. He plans to form this research in active discussion with local artists and spiritual practitioners engaged in practices of fortune.

Switzerland > Colombia | Comics

Andreas Gefe © Anita Affentranger

Andreas Gefe works as an illustrator and comic artist and is based in Zürich. Crucial to his work is emotional and atmospheric storytelling and is published in well-known magazines in Switzerland or the United States. His cooperation with artist from Music, Literature or Theatre are enriching his pictorial world.

(Not) a New York Love Story, comic by Andreas Gefe and Julian Voloj

Henry is the title of Andreas Gefe’s new comic project with author Julian Voloj — with whom the illustrator collaborated on (Not) a New York Love Story (2022). The story, based on true events and interviews, deals with the kidnapping of Julian’s cousin in Bogotá, Colombia. The narrative that emerged is one of mourning and remembrance, but also a portrait of Jewish life in Colombia. Julian’s grandmother and her brother survived the concentration camps, while their older sister had emigrated to Colombia before the Holocaust. The family history is marked by unspoken trauma — an undercurrent that shapes the narrative in profound ways. During his residency, Andreas would like to research and draw the locations on site. At the same time, he intends like to meet Colombian comic artists and curate an issue of the Swiss comic magazine Strapazin with their contributions.

Switzerland > Chile | Visual arts

Charles Benjamin and Manuela Morales Délano © Maria Larenas

Manuela Morales Délano uses everyday objects and inexpensive materials. Through the relationship between the body and domestic space, Morales explores themes of accumulation, domination, and devotion. By reconstructing and fictionalising specific histories and contexts, she creates tensions between imposed narratives and vernacular traditions while reflecting on the complex relationship between humans and nature.

Charles Benjamin approaches painting as an expanded practice. Wittgenstein’s idea that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ is central to his work, though more as a field of inquiry than an absolute truth. For this reason, the decorative — particularly the gingham check pattern — plays an important role in his practice as a kind of mystical field.

Together, Manuela and Charles run the project Mario Kreuzberg.

2.Documentación _Cuesta_ by Paulina Mellado_Instituto Tele Arte, 2026 – Manuela

During the residency, the duo proposes to develop a site-specific project at Galería Metropolitana, a space located in a peripheral community of Santiago de Chile. As with all their projects, they emphasise building connections with the local community, working with available materials and conditions, and reflecting the economic, political, and material realities of the site. Questions of historical context and precarity in the arts are addressed by engaging with local resources that are often overlooked, abandoned, or considered outdated.

Through their residency, Manuela and Charles explore neighbourhood dynamics around Galería Metropolitana: how spaces and materials are used and cared for, from private gardens to streets, from cherished objects such as a replica of the Eiffel Tower in a neighbour’s garden to forgotten TV antennas and memorial shrines. The artists aim to create a communal garden that enables exchanges among people, plants, and objects, activating everyday materials and relationships within the surrounding urban environment.

Switzerland > Brazil | Visual arts

Sebastián Dávila

Sebastián Dávila grew up between Puerto Rico, the United States, and Switzerland. His life across several countries forms the cornerstones that will define his artistic practice. In what he calls his ‘third geography’, Sebastián draws on fantasy to explore the dark underbelly of a supposed paradise. Here, monsters, codes, and architectural forms offer a glimpse of the imperial forces at work just beyond the frame.

Tierra Rota, Se Hace el Día (2023), by Sebastián Dávila

Gambiarra is a Brazilian word describing a cheap way to fix a problem through improvised or unconventional means, often in response to limited resources. The puxadinho could be seen as its architectural cousin: an informal extension added onto an existing structure. For his project Puxadinhos and Gambiarra: Models for life, art, and architecture, Sebastián — who, in his latest projects, has been concentrating on architecture as the backdrop of political upheaval and colonialism — intends to use these ideas as starting points to explore Rio de Janeiro’s informal and vernacular architecture, as models of horizontal planning and collective problem-solving.

Switzerland > India | Literature

Johanna Lier © Mario Kwast

After a career as an actress in film and theatre, Johanna Lier began her writing practice. She first published poetry collections, with which she participated in festivals and spoken word performances, while also working as a journalist in an international context. She went on to create theatre pieces and novels at the intersection of poetry and documentary, focusing primarily on migration. She is currently working on poetry and a novel. Her passion for research remains.

Fresh off the press © Johanna Lier

Johanna Lier will be working on her new writing project, a novel with the working title, Angel. While on residency, Johanna Lier plans to participate in workshops and other literary events, exchanging ideas, and building networks with writers and poets. Since beginning to work in different countries, she has been interviewing local poets about the role and significance of poetry. While on residency, she plans to conduct interviews with local and international poets

Switzerland > Vietnam | Design

KreativKonsum, courtesy the artists

KreativKonsum is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Zurich, Switzerland, working across the fields of product development, educational design, and scenography. They are driven by a passion for the diversity of processes involved in its work. For KreativKonsum, design offers an opportunity to engage with a wide range of people, materials, methods, and challenges. Sustainability, technological innovation, and a human-centred approach are naturally weaved into every concept the studio creates.

Interactive Climate Installation for Zurich © Marie-Christine Gerber

During their residency, KreativKonsum want to investigate the potential of terracotta as a climate-responsive material. Facing rising temperatures and changing microclimates, they will experiment with the material’s passive evaporative cooling and thermal properties. In collaboration with local designers, craftspeople, and manufacturers, their project aims to develop everyday modular structures and product concepts that offer practical adaptation strategies for both Vietnam and Switzerland. This exploration connects global climate issues with a sensory and material-oriented design approach.

Switzerland > Vietnam | Music

Simon Aubert & POL © Titouan Massé

Simone Aubert & POL have been working from Geneva together for approximately eight years. Their practice touches contemporary, pop, experimental, noise and punk music. Through the singularity of their sonic writing and their constant engagement in contemporary creation, Simone Aubert and POL have been regularly invited to compose original scores for dance, theatre, and cinema. Aesthetically, their hybrid approach blends electronics, industrial tensions, folkloric sonorities, and minimalist repetitive writing.

With a view to developing their fourth album as Tout Bleu, the duo now wishes to orient their research toward the world of percussion, directly linked to the residency in Vietnam. Inspired by Vincent Moon’s documentary on Hanoi’s experimental scene, the duo wishes to explore the ecosystem of vitality, blending musical traditions, electronics, noise, contemporary practices, and hybrid forms, and blend of porosity between heritage and avant-garde that resonates with them.

Switzerland > Mozambique | Visual arts

Laurence Favre © Ali El-Darsa

Laurence Favre is a Berlin and Geneva based visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher working across experimental cinema, installation, sound and writings. Rooted in analogue film and expanded cinematic practices, her work examines the politics of perception and the epistemic violence embedded in systems of representation. Through filmic and material processes, she investigates colonial archives, ecological loss, and non-human forms of memory, foregrounding opacity, fragility, and spectral modes of presence.

‚Butterfly Stories: Malaise II‘, Silent Green, Berlin – Berlinale 21st Forum Expanded Exhibition © Laurence Favre

Forthcoming Specimens is a long-term artistic research project between Mozambique and Switzerland. Taking as its point of departure Graphium junodi, a Mozambican butterfly named after the Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod at the end of the nineteenth century, the project investigates the colonial entanglements embedded in natural history collections and scientific taxonomy. Rather than approaching the specimen as a fixed object of classification, it considers it as a spectral presence carrying layered temporalities, silenced histories, and ecological transformations. Combining archival inquiry with field-based and embodied forms of research, the project explores how artistic practice can contribute to decolonial epistemologies. Building on from a research trip in 2025, the residency will focus on the development of a new immersive installation while strengthening collaborations with local artists, cultural workers, and institutions, creating a space to collectively imagine alternative forms of knowledge and representation.

Switzerland > Nigeria | Literature

Nora Osagiobane © Ladina Bischof

Nora Osagiobare is a writer of Swiss and Nigerian origin. Her writing focusses on questions about racial and gender identity, using humour and satire as tone of choice. Her debut novel Daily Soap won the Swiss Book Prize. She is co-president of the Swiss German PEN Centre. She lives and writes in Zurich.

© Ladina Bischof

During her residency in Benin City, Nora will develop her third autofictional novel, Osayuki. She sets out to untangle an existential feeling of distance, exclusion and the pursuit of belonging. Having roots in both Zurich and Benin City, the way Nora perceives one place is always shaped by the other. How can one belong, when parts history have been erased by colonial power? How can one belong when growing up in a different culture? How can one belong when divided by two different cultures? The driving force in Osayuki is the question of what one searches for as an Afro-diasporic person when searching for one’s roots. It is the question of the authenticity of the self, which encounters itself as different in every context and always seems to contain a gap.