Launch of the Manual on Sustainable Practices and Residencies in Athens
Part of the closing programme of the SAiR project
Snehta Residency, I. Drosopoulou 47, 112 57 Athens
Saturday, 29. 11. 2025, 12:00
As part of the SAiR project’s knowledge-sharing activities, the partners jointly produced the Manual on Sustainable Practices and Residencies. This work was led by MeetFactory, with editorial and coordination support from Zuzana Belasová and Kateřina Pencová.
To paraphrase what is mentioned in the manual, it does not aim to be an enumeration of steps we must take to be more sustainable, but rather an overview of different ways of thinking about sustainability in artistic residencies, which can be quite elusive by nature.
The manual indirectly follows on MeetFactory’s Sustainable Studio Practice Programme, initiated in February 2020. One of the main ideas behind this programme is to explore different ways of sustainable art thinking in the framework of artist residencies, without having to focus exclusively on the sustainability of material production.
In order to capture this approach, we invited Zuzana Révészová from Spolka, the team of experts in the field of architecture and sociology based in Košice. Zuzana has PhD in public administration and regional development at the Faculty of Economics at TU Košice, with a research focus on culture-led urban development and she shared with us her experience perspective on artist residency. This is followed by a text on sustaining collective work, proposing that labour in the art projects functions as an infrastructure in its own right. The contribution is written by eco-social designer Gaja Mežnarić Osole and architect-theorist Danica Sretenović, both members of Krater, an emerging production space for transdisciplinary practices from Ljubljana.
The manual gathers, in one place, all texts from the workshop cycle Rehearsing Faith, which took place online earlier this year as part of the SAiR project. Contributions were authored by Alex Alonso Díaz, Amelie Aranguren, Andrea Rodrigo, Anna Manubens, and Blanca de la Torre. It also includes a series of insightful artistic interviews with the residents who took part in the project. The last part of the manual captures the development of approaches and thinking about the sustainability of artist residencies in the culture centers that were partners in the project. Those contain reflections about what was successful and what was found to be a weakness during the project, as well as suggestions of solutions for improvement to ensure the sustainability of the future projects.
The texts are aptly complemented by illustrations from StonyTellers.
