A room for the artist, but what’s in it for the host?

I only got hold of Monocle’s April 2026 issue the other day. As I turned the pages, I noticed how stories that seem far apart actually meet around the same idea. The issue examines why, in an increasingly fragmented world, diplomacy still needs physical places, face-to-face encounters and cultural contact.

• Take “Diplomacy on a Plate”, a piece on the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, which explores this idea through gastronomy. Chef Michael Ciuffardi’s menus, which reflect Peru’s geographical diversity from the coast to the Andes and the Amazon, show that cooking can build cultural ties and can also become a diplomatic tool that supports tourism and trade relations.

What stayed with me is how culture stops being an institutional communications activity and becomes a mechanism that brings together people, expertise and resources. Creativity can open up ways of thinking about and telling even the most sensitive issues differently. Beyond diplomacy, that is essentially the taste the series left with me.

As I read these lines I am in Cappadocia, doing research for the creative residency programme in Uçhisar, Cappadocia, A.R.C. (A Residence of Creation), whose cultural strategy and programming I lead. It hits the nail on the head, I think to myself. Aren’t artist residencies also an infrastructure that allows cultural relationships to be built and sustained, a mechanism that brings together artists, creatives, researchers, institutions, local expertise and resources? Or why have they started to become one? Could there be a better opportunity to get to know a place’s nature, crafts and people; to encounter local knowledge and share experience; to pass that knowledge on in creative ways through art and culture, and to build new contexts?

A matter of a room and time

So what are these residencies, and what could they be? Before tugging at their corners, it is worth looking at where they began. The idea of giving an artist a place and time to work actually rests on a tradition of patronage much older than today’s residencies. Stretching from families such as the Medici supporting artists in Renaissance Italy to the French Academy founded in Rome in 1666, this history offers early examples of art production being supported through particular conditions and places.

The modern residency model took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries around settings where artists could focus on their work away from everyday life. The Worpswede artists’ colony in Germany and Yaddo and MacDowell in the United States were different examples of this approach. The basic promise was to give the artist uninterrupted time and space. It was a kind of romantic patronage.

In the 1960s, alongside the model that offered artists the chance to withdraw from society and work, another approach emerged that placed the artist inside society and its institutions. Founded in London in 1966 by Barbara Steveni and John Latham, the Artist Placement Group placed artists in factories, companies and government bodies so that art could encounter the way these structures worked. The artist’s presence in a place became, in itself, a form of research and interaction.

• In the 1990s, as programmes connected artists with international networks, they also made building a relationship with the local environment one of their most important parts. In the 2000s, with the influence of the internet, international funding and collaboration between institutions, these networks grew further, and residencies opened up to different disciplines and ways of working.

Today, both the host institutions and the participants of residencies have diversified. Hosts are no longer only cultural institutions, galleries, museums or individuals; they are also municipalities, universities, research institutes, craft schools, brands and hotels. As a result, different institutions began designing programmes for different practices, creatives and researchers. Though born of different needs, these programmes aimed to build a creative relationship with the place where they were located.

TransArtists’ historical overview highlights this transformation, showing that the focus of residency programmes has shifted from how they work towards their aims and the value they create. Research, mutual learning and engagement with the local context are thus becoming more visible among the aims of a residency.

Although the residency model in which the artist simply draws inspiration and produces has not been shelved, a new question is coming into focus: Who is the residency for? Can the time an artist, creative or researcher spends in a place contribute not only to their own work but also to a new body of knowledge and network of relationships about that place?

Why do we still just say “artist”?

First of all, as the scope of residencies widens, the word “artist” starts to fall short. Most residencies are turning the familiar artist residency, centred on the visual arts, into a “creative” residency. One reason is that writers, curators, designers, architects, chefs, craftspeople and researchers also need time, space and encounters with new contexts. The title no longer matters; the focus has shifted to the kind of research and production relationship a person builds with the place they are in.

Fogo Island Arts opens its programmes to writers and curators as well as artists; Casa Wabi goes beyond the visual arts to open a field of production stretching to literature, music, film, theatre, dance, sound and scientific research. One of the most interesting examples of this expansion is in gastronomy. The Culinary Artist in Residence programme at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency treats the kitchen as a creative studio. The Global Food Artist Residency in Shanghai brings chefs together with food designers, researchers, writers and curators in the same research setting. The subject thus becomes not only food but also the production system and local knowledge behind it.

Not a guest, a researcher

One of the most important shifts lies in the move from offering an artist space and time to produce, to giving them access to research a place. In these programmes, where fieldwork, new connections and ideas matter more than a finished work, the aim is for the artist and researcher to build a deeper relationship with the place. The ARCUS Project in Japan, with its ARCUS Research programme, is one of the most direct examples of this shift. The programme accepts not only artists but also curators, researchers, university teachers and writers, and places research and fieldwork at the heart of the residency. In Australia, The Farm Margaret River likewise gives artists a working environment in which to research land, agriculture, ecology and cultural context.

In this approach, the value of a residency begins to lie not only in the final product but in the knowledge gained during research, the connections made and the way the local context is seen afresh. My conversation with Saniye Manici Gezer, who researches the use of cehri (dyer’s buckthorn), a plant grown in Cappadocia and especially in the village of Boyalı, as a natural dye, along with other natural dyes, makes this point concrete from a different perspective. A technician in medicinal and aromatic plants, a nature researcher and a flora guide who lives in the region, Gezer stresses the importance of making local knowledge and the ecological situation visible through research, art and creative means, and she herself takes part in various projects in the field to draw attention to the subject. At A.R.C., she takes on a guiding role, bringing this landscape, the knowledge of natural dyes, the practices of their use and the people who carry this knowledge into the research process.

Development and local context

One step beyond research, the question goes a little deeper: What can a residency change in the place where it is, and who benefits from that change? Programmes that prioritise development and local context are thought of in terms of what the artist adds to the place. Especially in small towns and rural areas, residency programmes can help bring disused buildings back into use and get the local economy moving. They can also open up space for local people to take part in cultural production, for the region’s cultural assets to become visible and for new international connections to be made.

For example, in Sardinia, Nocefresca turns unused buildings and off-season accommodation into creative spaces, drawing artists, writers and other creative professionals to small settlements. It builds relationships with the local community through exhibitions, workshops and open studios. The cultural programme becomes one of the tools of rural development. Casa Wabi, meanwhile, sets up a more directly community-focused model. As a precondition, participants are expected to develop projects with local communities in Oaxaca so as to create a mutual exchange between artist and community.

The European Commission’s policy handbook on artist residencies also points to a similar potential for local communities: co-production, events and participation in the artist’s working process can build understanding between communities; in some programmes the resulting works remain in public use and can strengthen a sense of place. This also suggests that a residency’s contribution to a region cannot be measured by economic activity alone.

A question of transmission and bridges

Another potential of the residency is to bring the artist into contact not only with a place’s landscape, its air and water, but with the knowledge accumulated there. In Norway, Luster Mikromakeri is a substantial example in this respect. The programme invites artists to work in the workshops of local craftspeople; in fields such as wood, textiles and ceramics, artists encounter the knowledge and working practices of local makers first hand. Naturally, an important question arises here: does local craft simply become an aesthetic repertoire for the artist to use, or does it become the subject of mutual learning?

Without going far, there is an example in Avanos that prompts this question. Traditional potter Mehmet Körükçü and his son Oğuz make musical instruments from clay and leather. The person who encouraged Mehmet Usta (usta, a master craftsman) to take up this work years ago was the musician Mehmet Emin Bolat. I first heard this story through one of A.R.C.’s guest artists, Merve İşeri. Hidden behind the images promoted by mass tourism, this relationship became visible again thanks to a residency.

This example offers a possibility beyond seeing local craft only as a product on display or a workshop to visit: building new ties between the master’s knowledge and the artist’s practice. Sometimes, rather than creating a relationship from scratch, it is enough simply to make visible a story that already exists but has not been told enough.

What does the host want?

The residency model is no longer the preserve of art institutions alone; hotels, galleries, universities, brands and private organisations are also taking it up. Each institution has different priorities and a different capacity to put the model into practice. The real issue is to move the residency away from a one-sided sponsorship relationship and turn it into a model that creates mutual value for the artist, the institution and the local environment.

• Such a model can become an infrastructure that brings together creatives, researchers, institutions, local expertise and resources, and builds new relationships between culture, art, tourism and ecology. This requires going beyond the old idea of patronage and focusing on the process as much as, or even more than, the outcome. Just as the artist is expected to contribute to the place they are in, it matters that the host is open to learning and changing through the encounter.

In essence, offering a creative mind a room and time is a considerable opportunity for everyone involved. Today, when building context matters more and more, we need to rethink what kind of encounter a residency lays the ground for. Because how that encounter is shaped also determines what kind of traces it leaves behind.