ASTRA is a traveling residency inviting emerging artist to work and live in selected cities around the world. It supports the work of emerging artists creating hype around cultural events. It merges diverse cultures sharing a home and ideas that connect with tradition. It is a meeting point for the local and the global.
ASTRA enables a collaborative dialogue between the participants, ranging from sharing a home to influencing each other in the creative process.
The aim is to create a continuous movement, made of a flow of people working in diverse locations and mediums, generating favorable situations and contributing to the progress of each artistic practice.
meet the minds:
These three Italian women’s visionary approach on art is revolutionizing the world of artist residencies, crafting a niche environment for young artists to create and be inspired in a spatial ecosystem that embraces cultures and ideas globally.
ASTRA is a traveling residency inviting emerging artist to work and live in selected cities around the world. It supports the work of emerging artists creating hype around cultural events. It merges diverse cultures sharing a home and ideas that connect with tradition. It is a meeting point for the local and the global.
ASTRA enables a collaborative dialogue between the participants, ranging from sharing a home to influencing each other in the creative process.
The aim is to create a continuous movement, made of a flow of people working in diverse locations and mediums, generating favorable situations and contributing to the progress of each artistic practice.
The first Volume of ASTRA will be taking place in Spoleto during the Festival dei Due Mondi:
an annual cultural festival, held in Spoleto during the summer since 1958. (www.festivaldispoleto.com)
The criteria of selection of the cities is one:
ASTRA follows cultural events such as biennials and art fairs that are taking place in a specific city.
ASTRA is a one month residency featuring three artists.
During this time artists will work on brand new pieces and will interact with local artisans.
Group activities will include dinners, talks and performances.
Manifesto
I. ASTRA is a human construction
ASTRA is a product of the chemical combination of variable ingredients at random doses: such as Saturday night, or the frenetic talking of people, crossed legs or wine stains on a wool carpet.
ASTRA is all this and above all a simultaneous merging of three complementary minds. ASTRA is therefore a human construction.
II. ASTRA is a play of words
ASTRA is not a star but the impossible abstraction of the artist from the human being, according to de Kooning.
ASTRA is not a star, rather a set of asteroids that frantically orbits, meeting without colliding.
III. ASTRA is a space that travels
ASTRA is a physical and non-physical place, stable and dynamic, inexhaustibly firm.
IV. ASTRA is a place that returns
ASTRA is the collective traveller, who becomes rock in the middle of the sea for Odysseus. ASTRA is Odysseus, resting on this rock, looking back at the ashes of Troy while glimpsing at the image of Ithaca in the distance.
V. ASTRA is a continuous flux
ASTRA is time made of water and the river of faces that are lost and found. ASTRA is this river with no ending, which passes and stays. It is the water that is lost, not the one that rests.
VI & VII ASTRA is a starting point: ASTRA is the finishing line.
VOLUME I
open call
