Photo credit: Jhony Aguiar
Applications for the 2024 Artist Residency Program at Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Artes are open until December 15. Five places are on offer, one international, two national and two local.
The program aims to create a dialogue between the visual arts, the environment and traditional knowledge. This proposal, which is scheduled to take place between May and September 2024 in both national and international modalities, will last four weeks, the first of which will be spent in a Quilombo in the state of Goiás and three weeks at Sertão Negro, located in the Shangri-la neighborhood, in the northern region of Goiânia, capital of the Goiás State. Two places are on offer for the local residency, which also includes this experience in the Quilombola community, lasts 12 months and is aimed at artists or people living in Goiás. For this, Sertão Negro provides structure, resources and guidance to enable training and improvement in contemporary art. Scheduled to begin in May 2024, this type of residency offers a monthly grant of two thousand reais. By encouraging the local economy, community-based tourism and, above all, valuing traditional knowledge, this artistic residency program seeks to stimulate connections between Quilombola communities (daily life and the relationship with the land, their cultural and religious expressions) and artists in their research processes, practice and artistic poetics in the most diverse media, pictorial components and languages. During the three weeks at the Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Artes, located in Goiânia/GO, the resident artists (national and international) have access to accommodation in individual chalets and food; and receive a subsidy of 1500 dollars plus the cost of airfare.
Sertão Negro
Conceived and created in 2021 by visual artist Dalton Paula and his partner Ceiça Ferreira, Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Artes began its activities in 2022; and its purpose is to be a quilombo, an artistic-cultural space for experiences and exchanges with the environment.
The shared studio has a library with a collection of three thousand books, as well as equipment such as an engraving press and an industrial oven. In the backyard, as well as chalets for residents to stay in, there is a shack covered in piassaba straw, where capoeira angola, printmaking and ceramics classes are held, as well as sessions of the Maria Grampinho Film Club, whose curatorial programming highlights black cinematic productions. Built in an area of more than 960 m2 surrounded by various trees, medicinal plants and flowers, Sertão Negro was designed to be ecologically conscious, from collecting rainwater and using bio-construction techniques to preserving species native to the cerrado.
In just two years of existence, this space has made a name for itself on the art scene in the Brazilian Midwest, enabling it to connect internally, with the Goiânia community in general and with various agents in the art market, such as national and international artists, curators, gallery owners and collectors. This Sertão Negro Edital 2024 artist residency program is supported by the Open Society Foundations, through the Soros Arts Fellowship awarded to Dalton Paula in 2023.
"The residency is very important for many reasons. We could start from the perspective of exchange between different territories, countries and cultures; it's a good opportunity for residents to exchange knowledge and meet people. The residency has this character of immersion, of a time that makes it possible to develop research and this has to do with displacement, of leaving your place of comfort and this tensions, creates a situation that can be very favorable for the development of new work in terms of creativity. So, our residency has this proposal of being a leap into the deep, of giving density to be able to develop research," adds Dalton Paula.