The city of Cambridge is in a privileged position to host an art residency because of the city’s universities and leading international research.
The residency creates a platform for artists to engage in cross disciplinary dialogue with scientists, biologists, economists and other experts. Artists who are preoccupied with sustainability can facilitate, through their practice, the conditions to create new knowledges necessary to face new challenges, particularly those created by human activity. Working across disciplines allows these ideas to be negotiated between the most severe calculus and the most intense sensitivity, both of which are necessary in order to bring social responsibility back to popular imagination.
Sustainability works in three time spheres simultaneously: past, present and future. This alludes to a projection beyond a particular point in time, that is, to guarantee that the conditions for something to exist and prosper will remain there in the years and decades to come. Sustainability is a concept that has to be negotiated between past, present and the future, it is dynamic and malleable and it is precisely because of its highly unstable nature that it calls for us to revise the received knowledge and attempt to create new paradigms .
The sustainability residency for artists wants to act as a lab and a platform that facilitates this new type of knowledge to be created, expanded and applied.