Hybrida AiR is a residency program that took place between the 24th of June and the 6th of August, 2021 featuring nine artists from five different European countries. We announced an open call for participation and selected seven participants whose works touch upon aspects of the virtual and the physical realities of life today. Hybrida AIR consisted of two consecutive phases taking place digitally and on location. Rendering the creative process and its stages in this hybrid format, we aim to explore diverse ways of reading, writing, and creating art content, and the topologies that this approach can generate.

as opposed to techne?

It is becoming harder to separate art practice from its connection to technology. Their boundaries seem to be dissolving while the world is being redesigned digitally at an increasing speed. The first month took place online as a series of video meetings with the whole group once a week. A digital platform functioned as a virtual studio space where the participants of the residency were able to map out their work processes making them visible to the public. It was a way of getting to know each other and sharing what we did, leading up to two weeks of work on location in Älvsbacka in Sweden.

pixel perfect, evoking a craving for dirt, mud, and moisture

Do artists have the right tools or the time to question how they produce, communicate, or exchange cultural objects and experience? If the artistic activity has always been synonymous with paving new ways to experience the world around us, allowing for new models and abstractions, what happens now that the toolkit is becoming more and more virtual, and our reality more flat and shiny?

The residency format, online and in physical space, was both an adaptation to current circumstances, with the pandemic still unfolding, and a relevant mode of working, which relates to questions about digitalization and the creative process.

user—tester—hacker

How can we employ the disposition of the artist both as antagonist and producer again? Now is the time to renegotiate the modes of producing, handling, and assessing content, its type, and distribution. One needs to find a good stance in order to be able to recognize the outlines and shapes of things, the patterns that prompt points of reference and departure. How can artists develop a critical and hybrid perspective instead of only tokenizing their new virtual role?

The format of this residency serves to put these thoughts to the test. It is a starting point for a way of working, which can allow the creation of a more fluid framework that holds and hosts feedback loops, renderings, forkings, fusions, and tensions. These results can be fed back to the source in various ways such as theory, logistics, artworks, critical analysis, events, hierarchies, prompts, exercises, documentation, and rituals. It is important to focus not on a chaotic production, but rather listen, accept, adapt and prioritize how to calibrate this emerging framework: in other words to learn how to master its granular elements and its switches.

We would like to depart from the classic mode of exhibiting and proceed in a strategic manner with an open-ended score that is quite free. It is a curatorial and artistic experiment, a wager pushing the boundaries of a residency plan. This asks from residents to devise their own methodology, and construct their own goals when it comes to shaping their missions before, during and after their residency.

The location of Älvsbacka is in stark contrast to a digital environment of working. The estate that we are using has a centuries-old history. Nature is slowly taking over the facilities once inhabited and flourishing, and now slowly decaying. We hope that this way of working and the experience of coming to Älvsbacka has been an inspiration to the participants.

The exhibition unfolds on multiple planes forming a polyphonic network created on the site. Producing works and shaping an exhibition during the brief time span of two weeks was a challenge. Lines of thinking and making flowing in multiple resonances. Poetic contamination, honesty, fragility, and a good dose of humor created unexpected openings that can potentially give way to new other works. Our exhibition is a gesture calling for the exuberance of an open and fleeting community that creates its promise against all odds.

We gamble, we build, we invoke, we give signals, we entangle, we literalize, we bind, we fall and grow, and we rise.