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Call for Proposals

The Archive Transformed:

��������Ƶ Boulder Artist/Scholar Collaborative Residency

Chautauqua, ��������Ƶ Boulder, Boulder Public Library

Boulder Colorado

May 19-23, 2019

The University of Colorado Boulder's University Libraries, ��������Ƶ Art Museum, Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA), Center for Western Civilization, Thought, and Policy (CWCTP), the College of Music, along with the Louis P. Singer Fund for Jewish History and several departments in the College of Arts and Sciences are proud to launch a call for proposals for The 2019 Archive Transformed: A ��������Ƶ Boulder Artist/Scholar Collaborative Residency.

This residency is the first of its kind that brings together artists and scholars to take archival material, broadly conceived, and transform it or re-imagine it to create new knowledge. The archive under investigation can reflect the history of an individual, family, or institution, whether a government institution, NGO, or community group. Some examples could be a business, a hospital and its MRI archive, an indigenous community, a church, synagogue, or mosque, or a photographer’s archive full of negatives. Importantly, if the artist/scholar collaboration chooses to work with a particular individual, institution, or community, either the scholar or artist (or both) should ideally have a relationship with that entity.

The residency is wide ranging and can bring together anyone from a neuroscientist interpreting fMRIs working with a painter who visualizes the brain, to a historian investigating slave trading routes and a musician working with music that engages the slave experience. These collaborations will take archival material and transform it for the 21^st century in some innovative way whether musical, filmic, dance, visual, digital, or other modes of presentation not yet imagined.

For 2019, we will invite up to five collaborations (10 people) to participate in this all- expenses paid residency (travel, lodging, and food). In addition, each selected collaboration will receive $2500 to compensate for freelance labor and a $1000 project budget.  

For full consideration for your collaborative residency, the following must be received by December 15, 2018:

1. CV for each collaborator (two must be in residence, but more than two people can be involved in the collaboration remotely either via digital interface or some other means of virtual collaboration)
2. Description of the proposed project that responds to the following (750 words maximum):

• What is the project and identify your archive, broadly conceived?
• What will be the impact of your proposed project on yourselves and your audiences, and if you’re working with one, on your institution/community/individual who provided the archival material?
• How have you two worked together in the past?  What do each of you bring to the project and how to you imagine learning from each other?
• What does the project need, in terms of technical/space support, for it to be most successful?  Think black box theater, digital platforms, projection equipment, stages, gallery space, laboratory, pen, and paper…

The evaluation committee will take into account the criteria outlined by our advisory team:

1)     How is the archive being transformed for the 21^st century?

2)     How does the collaboration redefine the meaning of and relationship between creative work and scholarship?

3)     Are there relationships with the individual or institutional archive being presented?

4)     Is there enough of a relationship between the collaborators to lead to a productive, informative, and coherent project at the conclusion of the five-day residency as well as a longer term manifestation of that project for the future?

5)     How impactful is the presentation plan for both the individual life-work of the participants, and what is the relevance to the institution and/or community?

6)     Priority will be given to pairs that have at least one current ��������Ƶ affiliate involved in the collaboration, so if this applies to your collaboration, please state so.

The Archive Transformed is a five-day residency in which all artists and scholars will come to ��������Ƶ Boulder residing in two-bedroom apartments at Chautauqua (a historic retreat center), which has a history of university-community collaboration going back to the 19^th century.  The opening event will take place the evening of Sunday, May 19, 2019, and will be an informal meal followed by a presentation by one of the 2018 Archive Transformed projects, The Beregovski Project.  The first morning will be a communal breakfast with the presenters from the Beregovski Project, who can do a de-brief of the previous evening’s performance.  The first part of the day will be devoted to working with your collaborator followed by a visit to the ��������Ƶ Archives and then a happy hour at the ��������Ƶ Art Museum. All future breakfasts and dinners will be communal and will involve a morning agenda and intention-setting for the collaborators and a dinner-time check-in about what was accomplished that day.  Note that lunches are on your own.  These communal meals will also give time for cross collaborative synergies, as each pair might have ideas for the others.

The conclusion of the residency will be a public presentation of the “archive transformed” innovative product that the collaborators incubated at ��������Ƶ Boulder.  This raw work with receive minimal technical production and is intended to serve primarily as a work-in-progress, showing what collaborators will develop further after completing the residency as they present the material to the broader public and when relevant to the community, with whose material they were working.