SALVADOR DE BAHÍA
FUNDACIÓN SACATAR
International Artistic Residency
Sacatar Foundation invites artists from any country, any age, and all disciplines to conduct an artistic project during two months at their residence in the island of Itaparica, Bahía, Brazil. The foundation offers full economic support: airfare, lodging, meals and even support with contacting local artists of your discipline. You can apply every two years. Nearly 1000 artists apply and only 6 are selected for each period of residence, after a competitive selection process. All the process of application, documents, samples of your work and, if contacted, the last interview as a finalist, should be in English and/or Portuguese. For more information, donations and scholarship applications, visit: www.sacatar.org
Artists invited for the period October-December of 2012:
Amy Campion (dancer, USA),
Cristina Rascón Castro (writer, Mexico),
Ernesto Díaz (musician, Mexico),
Justin Shoulder (performer, Australia),
Matt Sheridan (visual artist, USA)
y Maya Watanabe (filmmaker, Peru).
My deepest thanks to all the Sacatar Foundation and all the team. The director, Taylor van Horne, the manager Augusto Albuquerque, as well as Alex Esquivel, Martia, Patricio, Odette and all the staff, made so many things possible during the residence and accompany us discovering the magic of the island and people.
My artistic project is well explained here:
http://www.sacatar.com.br/site/alumni.asp?id=261
The general experience of the group is narrated here:
http://www.sacatar.com.br/site/noticias.asp
During my visit to Brazil, I offered creative writing workshops at Cervantes Institute (Rio de Janeiro) and Sacatar Institute (Itaparica), as well as fiction readings and lectures invited by the VISIO Arts Festival (Salvador de Bahía), Public Library (Itaparica), Radio Tupinambá (Itparica), Colective literature events at Cafe&Cognac (Salvador), among others. During the Open Studio, at the end of the residence, I offered an artistic instalation: I combined sound and literature with recorded readings of my short stories mixed with candomblé music, while the text was on the wall and the visitors could have a dialogue. All activities and readings were in mainly in Portuguese language.
I was interested on how literature, creative writing and workshops were perceived and conducted in Brazil, so I joined two literature workshops in Salvador de Bahía, organized by the Cultural Foundation of Bahia State for Culture (FUNCEB). First I joined the course ““La palabra falante”- poetry and performance, conducted by Ricardo Aleixo (link ) from Minas Gerais. Late on I took the course “Narrativas curtas: o conto e a crônica” – Brief Narrative genres, taught by Fabrício Corsaletti (link), a writer from Sao Paulo. Both workshops were not related to Sacatar, therefore I had to apply locally and resulted selected to join both very interesting groups, where I met young and consolidated local writers and poets. These experiences gave me an amazing opportunity to establish deep and beautiful relationships with artists with my same interests and sensibility, and to understand how history, communications and literature are now debated among Brazilian community.
After my residence period, and thanks to the airfare support of Sacatar Foundation, I continued my travel south, to Buenos Aires, the north of Argentina and southern Uruguay. In Argentina I joined a seminar entitled: “Auster and Coetzee: their writingas construccion/deconstruction of the self”, with renowned writer and critic Cristina Piña (link) and -only for one session though- the seminar “Small Ilustrated World II: Art, childhood and shadows (Barrie, Hoffmann, Balzac, Carroll y Walser)” with acclaimed writer and poet María Negroni (link ). Both courses gave me new interesting views on how to treat my own writing for future creative projects.
