In the wake of accelerating funding cuts for marginalised voices in the arts, queer artist residencies are emerging as a refuge for resistance in unexpected, rural regions. From the alpine-fed waters of Switzerland to a stark coastal outpost in Kent, these are spirited places where travellers and artists can retreat and restore without bounds.
From its seat in the sun-drenched Tuscan hills, the sprawling Villa Lena Estate is a retreat in every sense of the word. While hotel guests bask in the heat and pause over a glass in between the vines, resident artists are just next door – seeking their own escape.
Creative residencies aren’t uncommon, and their impact is well documented: Anish Kapoor held residence at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, hosting his first exhibition of a storied career ahead. But increasingly these residencies are cropping up in unexpected places, and luring culturally curious travellers and artists alike, slightly off the beaten path.
For the rural Italian countryside, this makes for a surprising – and satisfying – juxtaposition, as artists exploring progressive, contemporary practice find themselves in the birthplace of the Renaissance. For several years, Villa Lena has partnered with MQBMBQ (My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness) to host a cast of creatives unearthing the “richness” of queer, Black identities.
“One of the first questions we ask prospective residents is how well they do in the middle of nowhere”, explains the project’s founder, Jordan Anderson, acknowledging that a majority come from major cities. But attracting the right artists, and big-name sponsors Bulgari and Gaultier, isn’t proving a challenge. “In places like the United States right now, there’s always so much asked of artists – queer, Black artists in particular”, he adds. “Residencies like ours offer them an opportunity, and an excuse, to breathe”.
On the shores of Lake Geneva in neighbouring Switzerland, another residency is delivering exactly that kind of escape. “We relieve our creatives of the pressures involved in producing for the public”, says Vanessa Cimorelli, curator at La Becque. It’s a rare, opportune moment for artists to make without expectations, no longer beholden to funding. For the many in residence exploring queer or decolonial subjects, that funding is ever more at risk back home.
Nowhere is artistic risk better understood than at Prospect Cottage, braced against biting winds and sea spray on the English coast of Kent. Albeit seeking a different, wetter kind of refuge, queer activist and film-maker Derek Jarman was drawn to the desolate beauty of this undoubtedly cinematic landscape. His spectacularly restored clapboard house, guarded by untamed wild planting, is still, even decades on from his death, a site of major cultural pilgrimage.
Here, lone artists take turns at a solitary stay in Jarman’s quarters, observed – but undisturbed – by the passing public, who can visit near year-round. Mattie O’Callaghan, one of this year’s residents, embraced the land’s history and leant into an “exploration of queerness as a way of challenging borders and binaries”. Today, the grounds are a designated area of natural conservation, and interventions as simple as a fence or hedge are forbidden. But this, O’Callaghan explains, is all part of the point; Jarman’s legacy is one of bold activist creativity, “without boundaries”.
Alarmingly, it’s a legacy that’s increasingly under threat, as we face a creeping erosion of funding for queer, minority, and marginalised voices in the arts. In the United States, artist Amy Sherald has cancelled a forthcoming show at the Smithsonian, citing concerns about how her painting of a trans Statue of Liberty would be displayed. Brazil’s last government, meanwhile, slashed budgets for queer filmmaking.
Historically, the arts have been a route to solace and community. Creativity has made space for telling stories otherwise untold – ones of joy or struggle, progress or persecution. The rising costs of showing, performing, making, and exhibiting, however (never mind those of simply living), are impacting artists globally. And many opportunities for creative freedom are disappearing at a worrying rate. Grants have been restricted, while institutions facing governmental pressure are too often scared and complicit.
Hence, queer artist residencies are more vital than ever. In the face of adversity, they are a refuge for resistance, where artists can breathe freely, experiment without compromise, and imagine futures that state structures are ever more unwilling – or unable – to support.
These places are powerful beacons of hope, in the most literal sense. Derek Jarman’s planting thrives today, despite the landscape’s adverse and often hostile coastal conditions. It is an apt reminder that persistence is rewarded, and that progress is always possible – even under the harshest of conditions, and in the unlikeliest of places.
www.villa-lena.it | www.creativefolkstone.org.uk | www.labecque.ch
Photography by Thierry Bal, Dan Sauer, Frederik Vercruysee and courtesy of La Becque, Prospect Cottage and Villa Lena Estate
