Group Residency Programme, Orkney: Air, Sea and Soil: MICRO-MACRO

Group Residency Programme, Orkney

Air, Sea and Soil: MICRO-MACRO

Sat 06 – Sat 13 September 2025

Application Deadline: Mon 14 April 2025

MICRO-MACRO has been devised around the relationships of ‘Air, Sea and Soil’, encompassing the Orkney Islands’ remarkable natural environment.

The Group Residency will be lead by Tracy Mackenna (she/her), Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal and facilitated by Tracy. A range of multidisciplinary Orkney-based discipline experts who hold precious knowledge of archaeological sites, spatial and local history past and present, and collecting and presenting, will contribute to bespoke sessions. 

Welcome to all creative practitioners and researchers interested in making, thinking and being in experimental ways. This Group Residency will take you out and about in Orkney, introduce you to the impact of climate crisis, to vast skies and the archipelago that has long been shaped by the sea. 

MICRO-MACRO is offered for practitioners and researchers working in all creative disciplines and for those who have a strong interest in the investigation of site and place.

FOCAL POINTS

• Creative practices
• Interdisciplinarity
• Technologies
• Co-learning
• Individual practice
• Experimentation
• Semi-structured programme
• Expert facilitator/s and guest contributors
• Collective platform for encounters
• Supportive, caring, non-hierarchical environment
• Fully catered
• Immersive experience
• Relationships to land, connections through place
• Location specific, inc. Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site
• Site (responsiveness)
• Cultural and environmental ecologies
• Memory (ecological, material, ruin)
• Imagining futures
• Publics; participants and audiences

AIM

The aim of the Group Residency is to develop approaches to place that are experimental, inventive in their form, and that respond to place by paying attention to the intersections and collisions between art, culture, materiality, technologies and place. 

Opportunities are created for creative practitioners and researchers to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and analogue, for imagining new responses to places and the multiple, layered and contested histories they hold.

FEE

The Residency Programme is operated on a non-commercial cost-covering basis, and is financially supported by The Museum of Loss and Renewal in order to keep fees low. The residency fee is £1500 GBP, paid by the resident. It includes the residency programme, full board, collection/return to nearest airport/ferry point, accommodation in en-suite rooms, work spaces. Catering (3 meals each day).

You will be responsible for funding and organising your own travel, your own insurances and any visa requirements particular to your country of origin. Travel information will be supplied (Kirkwall Airport and Orkney Ferries), and collection/drop-off at the beginning and end of the Group Residency will be arranged.

We do not have external funding for this project, so regret that we are unable to offer assistance with fees, travel, production costs or other subsistence. Typically, successful applicants source funding by applying to their national arts funding bodies, personal fundraising, or through academic institutional support. Formal Letters of Invitation can be provided to assist in this process.

More information about the Group Residency Orkney: MICRO-MACRO:

https://tracy.mackenna.studio/the-museum-of-loss-and-renewal-residencies/group-residency-programme-orkney/air-sea-and-soil-micro-macro/

APPLICATION

Application Deadline: Mon 14 April 2025

Applications for the Group Residency Programme, Orkney: MICRO-MACRO can be made via the Application Form on The Museum of Loss and Renewal website: 

https://tracy.mackenna.studio/the-museum-of-loss-and-renewal-residencies/group-residency-programme-orkney/application-information/

Please note that feedback on unsuccessful applications cannot be provided.