meeting on artist residencies

How do we define what we do? What words represent our practice? How is it possible that we cannot find the precise word to define what we spend so much of our days doing?

I Don’t Want to Be a Hotel is a gathering on artistic residencies. A gathering that revolves around a publication of the same title, launched and shared for the first time through the voices of all the people who have given it words.

This gathering places hospitality, relationships with residents, the role of those who host, and what we call accompaniment at its center. It proposes questioning the pre-established frameworks of residency programs and moving beyond the idea of residency as mere accommodation or workspace, instead thinking of it as a context shaped by bonds, forms of coexistence, and community-building practices.

Both the publication and the gathering are the result of a shared process between hablarenarte, La Escocesa and Idensitat, initiated in 2023 and developed through a series of encounters under the title from this now (more info here).

Participants include Roser Colomar, Irati Irulegi, Flavia Introzzi, Emma Brasó, Alba Colomo, Clara Piazuelo, Idoia Zabaleta, Itxaso Corral Arrieta, Ona Bros and Yazel Parra.

bios

Ona Bros works from a political attention to images as catalysts of complex semiotic, technical, and material configurations. Her practice is situated and embodied; she researches through lived experience and relationality, from a queer way of inhabiting and a transfeminist sensibility. She works with photography, video, writing, and live arts, placing these materials in dialogue with distant epistemic fields in search of narratives capable of fracturing — perhaps briefly — the present. She holds a degree in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, graduated in Photography from the Fundació Politècnica de Catalunya, and completed a Master’s in Artistic Production and Research at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Itxaso Corral Arrieta is an artist whose practice unfolds across live arts, performance, writing, publishing, and educational and artistic research contexts. Her work inhabits the intersections of the scenic, pedagogical, and experimental, exploring forms of embodied, sensitive, and relational knowledge. She trained in Journalism and Performing Arts in the Basque Country, later expanding her studies in Film and Performance Studies at the University of Kent and at the École Jacques Lecoq. She later completed the Master’s in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture (UCLM and Museo Reina Sofía) and the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at MACBA. She is currently developing a doctoral research project she calls Paranormal Doctoral Thesis.

Idoia Zabaleta is a choreographer. At the Faculty of Biology, she specialized in ecosystems and population dynamics. In the 1990s she studied new dance and improvisation. Since 2000 she has developed her own work, and since 2008 she has co-created and co-directed the artistic residency space Azala, located in the village where she lives in southern Álava, Lasierra. Since 2019 she has been part of the editorial team of Borradores del futuro, a collection of fables imagining the future through concrete experiences. In 2023, the artists’ cooperative Tractora Koop published Foku 2, a reflection on her artistic trajectory. In 2024–2025 she is an associated artist at Azkuna Zentroa.

Yazel Parra is a Venezuelan performer, researcher, and cultural mediator. She defines herself as a deconstructed actress/cultural worker. She completed postgraduate studies (Master’s and PhD, UAB) on the political and poetic possibilities of contemporary theatre created within marginalized communities, and attended the Independent Studies Program at MACBA (2023–24). Her current practice investigates artistic languages through the materiality of the body and everyday life surrounding food, work rhythms, and domestic knowledge, seeking to listen to the questions that emerge and how they propose other forms of cultural mediation.

hablarenarte is a non-profit organization based in Madrid that has worked since 2002 in the fields of cultural mediation, expanded curating, contemporary creation, and education. Through its own programs and collaborations with local and international organizations and agents, hablarenarte contributes to contemporary culture by helping build new imaginaries and advocating feminist, inclusive, and participatory ways of working. It also promotes research residencies through the Planta Alta space.

Idensitat is an art project that experiments with ways of intervening in territory across its spatial, temporal, and social dimensions through creative processes. It operates as a system incorporating projects, actions, and interventions extending across different spaces and contexts, combining research, production, residencies, mediation, management, education, and communication. It is grounded in collaborative dynamics that connect contemporary artistic practice with other disciplines, developing mechanisms linked to social space. Members of Idensitat include Ramon Parramon, Anna Recasens, Irati Irulegi, Roser Colomar, Albert Gironès, and Anna Vilamú.

This activity is part of the Ministry of Culture’s public funding programme for the creation, research and production of artistic projects in residence.

If you have any needs or questions regarding the accessibility of this activity, please visit our page on “access to La Escocesa” by clicking here.