Cambridge Sustainability Residency
Founder and organiser: Marina Velez
The Residency is an exercise in social choreography, it involves coming together to think, explore and investigate what sustainability is and in what ways it can be manifested in artists’ practices. The city of Cambridge is in a privileged position to host an art residency because of the city’s universities and leading international research. The residency creates a platform for artists to engage in cross disciplinary dialogue with scientists, biologists, economists and other experts. Artists who are preoccupied with sustainability can facilitate, through their practice, the conditions to create new knowledges necessary to face new challenges, particularly those created by human activity. Working across disciplines allows these ideas to be negotiated between the most severe calculus and the most intense sensitivity, both of which are necessary in order to bring social responsibility back to popular imagination.
Why sustainability
Sustainability works in three time spheres simultaneously: past, present and future. This alludes to a projection beyond a particular point in time, that is, to guarantee that the conditions for something to exist and prosper will remain there in the years and decades to come. Sustainability is a concept that has to be negotiated between past, present and the future, it is dynamic and malleable and it is precisely because of its highly unstable nature that it calls for us to revise the received knowledge and attempt to create new paradigms .The sustainability residency for artists wants to act as a lab and a platform that facilitates this new type of knowledge to be created, expanded and applied.
Visiting the David Attenborough Building, University of Cambridge
Fostering skill sharing and collaborative research
Visit to Reisner Lab, Sainsbury Lab and the Polar Institute, University of Cambridge
Cooking together and sharing food as an act of radical care
Liberating food and cooking for homeless (Foodcycle Cambridge)
Collaborative food sharing at Wysing Arts Centre
