Inter-residency exchanges
The International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) develops its international cultural activity within its regular exhibition programme, the production in its Print Studio, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the running of its creative and residency centre MGLC Švicarija. Especially with the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, we turn to the cultural and art worlds that are less known in Slovenia and bring new insights into social reality. We have recently successfully realised our international cooperation at the EU level by completing three projects supported by EU’s Creative Europe and Erasmus+ programmes: Perennial Biennial, In from the Margins and Printmaking for Everyone. During the projects’ implementation, we connected with similar biennials and print production centres. With international projects, we promote new modes of including various communities in our art and support programmes and strengthen our creative partnerships.
The Sustainability is in the AiR (SAiR) project
International cooperation makes it possible for residency centres to become dynamical hubs that respond to the challenges of modern times. Since its opening in 2017, MGLC Švicarija has also been a special model, perhaps even a unique example of establishing connections between artists from the local environment and foreign artists in residence. MGLC Švicarija houses 11 work studios, which are intended for artists from Ljubljana and whose use is granted for the period of five years with possible extension. They are complemented by two apartments, each with a work studio, intended for young artists (up to 35 years of age) from Slovenia, who can live and work in them for two years. They are all connected by three apartments, each with a work studio, intended for artists from abroad, whom we host for one to two months or, exceptionally, longer. The combination of short-term and long-term use of the facilities at MGLC Švicarija brings many advantages and challenges.
An interesting possibility for cooperation and the development of our existing residency programme opened with Creative Europe’s financial support. For the period between 1 February 2023 and 31 January 2026, we thus became the project coordinator of Sustainability is in the AiR, which connects MGLC Švicarija with three European residency centres: MeetFactory in Prague, Snehta in Athens and Matadero in Madrid. With the project, we develop new models of managing residency centres, introduce green and sustainable practices in art production and promote the so-called slow mobility.
The project’s main activities are: a) inter-residential exchanges: each centre hosts six artists from another country and sends two local artists abroad; b) production of new artworks; c) knowledge exchange: a series of online workshops and the preparation of a manual on sustainable residential practice; d) presentation of the project’s artists in residence at a pop-up exhibition in Athens at the end of the project.
Activities of the project partners and various starting points
As the project coordinator, MGLC liaises with the partners, organises partner meetings and runs the residencies at MGLC Švicarija for selected artists from Greece, Spain and the Czech Republic. Matadero runs residencies in its production and residency centre in Madrid and coordinates a cycle of four online workshops entitled The Rehearsing Faith, intended to examine the strategies aimed at including sustainable principles, solidarity, care and non-hierarchical management modes in art practice and institutions. The workshops are led by the curators and theoreticians Amelie Aranguren, Anna Manubens, Andrea Rodrigo and Blanca de la Torre. The substantive emphases of the online workshops will be included in the manual on sustainable residency programmes and mobility prepared by the third project partner, MeetFactory from Prague, which also runs its residency programme. Snehta runs the residencies in Athens and curatorially directs the final exhibition of the projects of all participating artists.
Since February 2023, we have had three meetings; in March 2023, in Ljubljana, in October 2024, in Madrid and, in March 2025, in Prague. The last, concluding meeting will take place at the end of November 2025 in Athens. We also prepared the open call for artists in residence on the basis of which we selected seven artists and an art duo: Lea Culetto and the duo Small but dangers, consisting of Mateja Rojc and Simon Hudolin (Slovenia), Sara García Fernández and Adrianna Szojda (Spain), Lenka Kubelová and Olga Staňková (Czech Republic) and Maria Nikiforaki and Christina Zampoulaki (Greece). The residential exchanges began at the end of 2023 and will conclude in November 2025.
During the implementation of the project, the partners also learned about their differences: MGLC and Matadero are city public cultural institutions with stable funding, while Snehta and MeetFactory are private non-profit organisations dependent on project-based and unpredictable funding. MGLC and MeetFactory manage their residential infrastructure, studios and apartments, while Snehta and Matadero have to rent apartments for their residents. Matadero runs a big community space on an industrial cultural heritage site where artists in residence can work. The same goes for MeetFactory, where the contacts between residents are intensive. At MGLC Švicarija, the residents are “left” to the peace and nature of the city park, while, in Athens, the artists find themselves in the middle of a creative restlessness of the once antique and now urban metropolis.
Promoting sustainable art practices
The selected artists and art duo in residence share sustainable art practices, DIY and DIT approaches to work, an emphasis on the research process and the exploration of a particular material, but especially the commitment to the original idea and a gradual development of the project over a longer period of time, without any time limits and deadlines. The artists spend between two and three months in three residency centres outside their homeland. With the project, we offered them a space, professional staff support and funding for the production of new artworks. The decision to work with a smaller group, which was made in the stage of project preparation, proved to be rational in terms of implementation and conducive to the career development of the artists and the art duo. During the project, professional and personal ties are established, which also enable the so-called slow curating.
MGLC Švicarija as the venue of exhibitions, performance art pieces, participatory events and an art video
MGLC Švicarija hosted Lenka Kubelová and Olga Staňková between December 2023 and March 2024; Sara García Fernández between September and November 2024; Adrianna Szojda and Christina Zampoulaki between January and March 2025 and Maria Nikiforaki between September and October 2025. At the same time, we coordinated the residencies of Lea Culetto and the art duo Small but dangers in Prague, Athens and Madrid.
On 8 February 2024, on Doors Open Day in Švicarija, Lenka Kubelová and Olga Staňková presented their work at two month-long exhibitions. With the exhibition Rhizosphere, Lenka Kubelová explored what happens in the sphere of soil, roots and related microorganisms. The artist found inspiration in the winter nature of Šišenski hrib. Having recently expanded her knowledge on natural pigments and colourings, she made a pigment collected from the root systems of uprooted trees. At the same time, she fermented oxymel with pine branches, exhibited winter mushrooms and wrote an ethical manual on foraging and preparing juices from natural ingredients. With illustrations, screen prints on ecological paper and an art booklet or zine, she pointed to the ecosystem and its significance for humanity.
At her exhibition, which she named Fluid Nature – Forest of Knowledge, Olga Staňková exhibited a transparent paper on which she had painted forest motifs. She was also inspired by the Tivoli forest, in which she observed specific parts and forms of natural structures. The result was a dynamic visual world, an artistic forest in the middle of Švicarija, in which drawings subtly addressed the visitors through movement and transformation. Stillness, observation, subordination, withering away, acceptance of loss, recovery, appreciation of the smallest accomplishments, resistant growth and creative continuation were the messages of the artist’s exhibition project.
Sara García Fernández completed her residency on 12 November 2024 with her performance Moulding Mourning Mouths. Her project deals with planetary mourning, which is connected with co-existence and food ethics of multispecies. The project focuses on grains and bread, offering and hospitality, but also climate change and the grief we experience due to the irreversible loss of biodiversity. The artist examines various edible offerings that we make to the dead and the extinct and the types of relationships we establish to continue providing them with an existence among us. In Slovenia, the artist worked with buckwheat as this pseudo cereal has been part of the edible culture here since the 15th century. At the MGLC Print Studio, she created screen prints with the motif of a table and offerings, experimenting with natural colourings and using beetroot juice for the printing. Her poetical performance consisted of her reciting a text and a specially created garment decorated with baked goods made out of grains, in which she addressed us and invited us to the table. The audience could enjoy the baked goods and taste the prints. The artist created an intimate sensory experience that explored the concept of hospitality and consequently our relationship with the Other.
The participatory community event, which took place at the edge of and in the forest of Tivoli Park, was put on by Christina Zampoulaki and Adrianna Szojda on 19 March. Adrianna Szojda’s project In-between Soil and Debris: Regenerative Practices and Methodologies with and for the Damaged World mutates and transforms depending on the place where it is developed but always seeks to do the same: trace regenerative practices that already exist within the community, understanding each community as a set of dynamic interspecies relations. The artist invited us to send a message from “soil to soil”. During her residency at MGLC, she prepared some screen prints on compostable paper made from the introduced plant Fallopia japonica with the soil from the forest and a local organic farm. The visitors wrote a message on them with plant-based ink and later buried it somewhere. The artist says that, as they decompose, our messages will be released as a memory of the regenerative potential of the healthy common land, in which lies our shared future.
Christina Zampoulaki invited us to a meeting After Dinner. The artist explores the interconnectedness of living organisms, focusing on food systems and the supply chains within Western capitalist structure. At the residency, she investigated our personal and communal notions of domestic food waste and the possibilities of using it as material for bioplastics. From the viewpoint of the natural environment around Tivoli Park, she explored the (after)life of food by creating an imagined mythological reality of it. In her residency apartment, she prepared a presentation of her work and invited us to the table, to a “feast of forgotten life forms”, from bio-leather to new species. She prepared all the dishes made from domestic food scraps herself by dehydrating, chopping and cutting them and the like, so, at the end, we could taste various dishes made out of banana peels, onion… Her message is that food is both a political tool and a living ecosystem that shapes our identities and reflects global systems of power.
Maria Nikiforaki is a visual artist working at the intersection of performance art, film, video and dance. Her project Rituals for New Futures explores the transformative power of rituals in shaping political places and addresses urgent environmental concerns while including narratives of sci-fi feminism and imagining alternative futures where marginalised voices are heard and their images visible. The project features a heroine inspired by sci-fi feminism called Heroína, who connects with the elements of water, earth, fire and air and their potentials for new sustainable futures. The first chapter, La Creación de Una Heroína, began in Madrid and focused on air as an element of the spirit. The second chapter, Awakening Death, explored the element of earth and its deep connection with memory, burial and rebirth. With the performance in Prague, Heroína embarked on a mythic journey through fire – the energy that not only powers civilisations but also inflicts the scars of exploitation and loss. During her residency in Ljubljana, the artist will create the third chapter of the project, consisting of a video in which Heroína will descend into the underworld.
SAiR and artists from Slovenia
Lea Culetto works in the field of visual arts with a focus on feminism. Using textiles and mixed media, she creates objects and installations that question the ideals, taboos and perceptions of the female body, often drawing on personal experience. During her residencies, she examined the socio-cultural significance of hair and hairiness. From the feminist perspective, she explored the history of hair and its duality – simultaneously alive and dead, valued and loathed, uncovering the myths and narratives in which hair symbolised power and identity but was even more often used to control the female body, which had (and still has) to conform to patriarchal norms of beauty and subordination. She gradually presented her work at her residencies in Prague, Madrid and Athens and, in its entirety, at her solo exhibition in Ljubljana titled Combing Through (11 April–6 May 2025, Škuc Gallery, curators: Urška Aplinc, Lara Plavčak, production: World of Art, School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing/SCCA-Ljubljana, Škuc Gallery).
The art duo Small but dangers (Mateja Rojc and Simon Hudolin) enthuse with their subtle and often humorous gesture of finding a new purpose, content or value for disused and discarded objects. They draw our attention to the ordinary things in our everyday lives that we do not notice. During their residencies, they created new-old works by employing their art method of appropriation and reclamation while using minimal funds and interventions. Their exhibitions at the residency centres were accompanied by a thought-out dialogical presentation, in which the artists complemented each other in conversation and, with their works, established an inspirational space for reflection. At the end of November 2025, upon the 21st anniversary of the duo’s establishment, their solo exhibition will open at MGLC.
MGLC Švicarija proved to be a space of creative withdrawal where the artists could deepen their research of environmental topics and the issues of the future of nature and humanity. The artists managed to transform their residency apartments into improvised work labs and take advantage of the technical capacities of the MGLC Print Studio and the expertise of our master printmaker Jakob Puh. The artists in residence from Spain, the Czech Republic and Greece brought to the MGLC Švicarija residency centre, which houses the studios of established Slovenian artists of the older generation who work especially in the fields of painting, sculpture and printmaking, more processual, non-material and participatory approaches. Through the SAiR project, we have introduced green and sustainable approaches to our residency programmes and promoted the so-called slow mobility. The artists in residence were able to take different advantages of the space and time that the project offered them in three years, four residency programmes and four European capitals. During this time, the partners got to know each other and learn how to sustainably run a residency centre, one that will be able to keep up with the social changes of the present time and the increasingly more unpredictable future.
Written by Dušan Dovč.
Project partners:
International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), Ljubljana
MeetFactory, Prague
Matadero, Madrid
Snehta, Athens
Project duration:
2023–2026
Project webpage:
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Essays
