The creative project is the primary component of each resident’s self-directed inquiry during an MLS field school event. It is not meant to develop a fully-polished or ‘completed’ work, but to rather enter into the intensive messiness of a thought-in-motion over the course of the week that connects with the local ecologies, the event thematics, and the energies co-produced by our temporary community.

Our responsibility as event curators is to help catalyze, challenge, inquire, provoke, suggest, coach, remix or otherwise support your creative inquiry in any way we can.

On the final day of each residency event there will be an informal ‘exhibition’ or sharing opportunity of these creative projects to launch us back to other ecologies and other creative potentials.

Creative Project Proposals

In your application you will have 300 words to describe a proposal for a creative project or practice that in some way connects to the thematics of the particular residency event in question. We are mostly interested in project proposals that speak to a local context or site-specificity, as well as projects which are analog and more or less ephemeral. Innovative connections to theme and context are the most important factor in our evaluation of applications.

Creative projects might include anything from more traditional forms of land art sculpture to performance, dance, eco-diagramming, solargraphy, poetics, experimental writing, walking studies, new cartographies, music, pedagogy, hybrid practices and much, much more . . .

The ethics of space and place should be considered when developing an idea. We are visitors to all spaces and must actively work towards a mindful presence. What are our responsibilities to the place we are visiting? Project proposals should illustrate an artistic practice considerate of place, ecology, history, human and the non-humans with whom we are sharing the space.

Finally, it is important to maintain flexibility. Once we are in the residency space ideas proposed might need to (and often should) be reimagined to align with the space in which we are temporarily visiting. The emergent quality of art practice is integral to the creative inquiry of an MLS residency: thought-in-motion. The proposal does not constrain your creative practice and art work, but rather opens you up into the middle of a process.

By remaining flexible and willing to make changes based on site-specific opportunities, affordances and requirements of the residency space, perhaps we remain open to the world.