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Ƶ Boulder Artist/Scholar Collaborative Residency
Chautauqua, Boulder, Colorado
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 would be a business, a hospital and its MR image archive, a Native American 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 reflects the slave experience. These collaborations will take archival material and transform it for the 21st century in some innovative way whether musical, filmic, dance, visual, digital, or other modes of presentation not yet imagined.
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, which has a history of university-community collaboration going back to the 19th century. The first half-day will be devoted to learning about the resources that Ƶ has available and then to start working on the project. Breakfasts and dinners will be communal and will involve a morning agenda setting for the collaborators and a dinner-time check-in about what was accomplished. 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 will have been incubated at Ƶ Boulder. This raw work will be a project that the collaborators can take with them as they present the material to the broader public and when relevant to the community, whose material they were working with.
