Becoming A Resident Of The Isle Of Man

[Charlotta Menchaca]

TheRabbit Island Residency is pleased to announce the selection of three artists for its 2024 program. Each residency will be supported by an unrestricted honorarium of $3,300 USD, made possible by generous grant funding and donor contributions.

To provide insight into the quality and ambition of the proposals received, we are sharing brief biographies of each, along with the artist statements and residency proposals from the residents' applications. We acknowledge that proposal ideas may evolve as the residents experience life and work on the island. We look forward to following their artistic journeys and sharing their research and work throughout the program season.

Since its inception in 2011, the Rabbit Island Residency has supported the creative endeavors of 45 residents and over 90 collaborators. These residencies have resulted in a diverse range of artistic expressions that critically engage with issues of conservation, culture, and our relationship with the natural world. We are confident that this year's residents will continue this tradition and contribute valuable perspectives to these ongoing dialogues.

The selection committee extends its sincere gratitude to all who applied to the 2024 Rabbit Island Residency program. The pool of applicants was exceptional, and while we regret not being able to offer residencies to all, we are honored to be welcoming and working with Ale, Alyssa, and Moheb this summer.

Among other distinctions, Ale has been a fellow of Mexico's National System of Creators twice, has obtained an Honorable Mention at Collide@CERN Ars Electronica in 2013, received the Visual Arts Award of the SIVAM Foundation in 2006, and received a fellowship Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (1999-2000). During 2021, she participated in Artists@Sea, a scientific research expedition of the seabed in the Gulf of California aboard the ship FALKOR, an initiative of the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Ale exhibits work nationally and internationally, and is featured in several public and private collections.

Each place has its own song, a symphony of the rhythms given by nature. The basic pace of everywhere on Earth is the moon cycle, the Sun, solstices, and equinoxes. Then, the distinction of each place is given by its meteorology due to the territory's qualities, followed by fauna and flora. Throughout time, years, and centuries, the rhythms of nature have changed. Our ancestors had observed and registered nature as a necessary act of survival. Observing the rhythms that repeated and the exceptional events of each year, they found the basis for our knowledge of nature. In the beginning, it could have been cave paintings, stone carvings, totems, songs, myths, storytelling, the way human beings create a memory of the natural rhythms, then (you know the history). And now, as a society, our central relationship with nature is data.

I propose to observe and create a notation of everything that happens, moves, changes, or stays still on Rabbit Island and what my senses can reach. I will work with sunrise, sunset, and the moon as a rhythm (I chose the dates that include nearly the time between full and new moons).

The artwork will be a notation of the changing skies, clouds and winds, light colors, sounds, and fauna and flora's presence and behavior, from leaf fall to insect call.

I foresee an artwork that involves a contemporary score made out of drawings, possibly by objects (sculptures) that musicians or singers could perform. The specific time of the residence score and the imagined one of its origins and becoming. Other possible outcomes include a performance, an artist's book, storytelling, or other media.

Biography

Alyssa Songsiridej is the author of Little Rabbit, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Edmund White Award. She is also a 2022 5 under 35 National Book Foundation honoree, and lives in Philadelphia.

Proposal

My project is from the point of view of a pregnant woman who has fled her marriage for a remote island, which increasingly becomes its own active character in the novel. My experience on Rabbit Island will give me the critical sensory details and experience needed for this aspect of the work. The rough outline of my project concerns Tesa, who at age 37 becomes unexpectedly pregnant. Because her husband is morally opposed to having children due to climate change, she avoids telling him and instead moves with her friends to the aforementioned island.

Biography

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who has presented work at literary, art, and public spaces around North America and abroad with support from diverse institutions. His debut poetry collection HOMES was a finalist for several awards and explores nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland. He lives in Minneapolis in the Dakota and Anishinaabe homelands of Minnesota where he was program director for the Arab American arts organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and recently a Milkweed Editions fellowship.

Proposal

This is a performance art project, and an existential one. A deculturization project; a naturalization project beyond nation-state terms. This is symbolic, speculative, sublime (scientific sense).

The 2024 Rabbit Island Residency Call for Applications is now closed. This year we received 313 applications. Thank you to everyone who spent time crafting their statements, proposals, and submitting work samples. Over the coming weeks the Selection Committee will review applications, narrowing the submissions down to a shortlist and then a finalists list. All applicants will be notified at the end of April and finalists will be interviewed. Awarded residencies will be announced in early May.

The 2024 Rabbit Island Residency Program is now accepting applications. This year we anticipate awarding three residencies that will take place between June and September. With the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and continued contributions from donors we are excited to support awarded residencies with the following:

We are excited to announce awarded residencies for the Rabbit Island 2023 Residency program. Three residencies have been awarded featuring a total of six artists. Each residency is supported by an unrestricted honoraria of $3,000 USD made possible by grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The awarded residents are:

Below are short biographies and artist statements of each awarded resident, in addition to their proposals. While we acknowledge that each resident's ideas may evolve while living and working on the island, we share these in the spirit of curiosity, transparency, and to provide insight into the quality, critical nature, and ambition of the proposals we receive. We look forward to sharing the residents' research and work as we move forward through this program season, and beyond.

The committee extends a sincere thank you to all who applied to the Rabbit Island 2023 Residency program. While we regret not being able to offer more residency positions, it is an honor to be working with the following artists.

Ziqi Xu is a paleontologist and theatre designer from Shenzhen, China, currently based in Johnson City, Tennessee. She holds bachelor's degrees in geology and theatre design from the University of Washington and is now pursuing her passion for paleontology at East Tennessee State University. Xu has designed lighting for a diverse range of theatrical works, including traditional Shakespearean plays, modern Chinese comedy, and an improv show adapted from children's television classics. She has also gained field experience in Montana for her geological and paleontological studies. Currently, Xu's research focuses on understanding the rodent community in the Appalachian region about 5 million years ago.

Artist Statement

Our collaboration combines our respective backgrounds in visual art, sound studies, geology and paleontology and investigates the ways in which art and science communicate. We are fascinated by the challenge of locating ourselves within the vastness of geologic time and the ways in which our human experiences are intertwined with the earth's cycles of growth and decay. Reflecting on environmental issues and human dislocation of space, we build sensory channels between the personal, the human, and the metaphorical with the othered, the terrestrial, and the scientific.

Our process begins as an intimate and private journey and evolves into a more holistic approach incorporating scientific research and crafting in situ. Using electricity, magnetism, and sound to activate images, forms, and found objects, we create visual and aural assemblages using materials both foraged from nature and from our daily surroundings. By working in situ in places undergoing transformative yet under-recognized forces, our collaboration proposes an alternative mode of relations, one that does not consider Landscape as a static subject but as an active agent representing the constant flux between human and natural histories.

Proposal

As a team of artists and researchers from diverse backgrounds, we would like to explore the question of how time on Rabbit Island moves on a different scale from the one we experience in our daily lives. We are drawn to the ways in which geologic traces are preserved and changed by the island's ecosystem. By studying, documenting, and recording the biota of Rabbit Island as well as our interactions with it, we hope to uncover memories of non-anthropocentric records of time.

Our interdisciplinary approach, combining visual art, sound studies, and scientific research, offers a unique perspective on the natural world. Through our activities on Rabbit Island, we aim to provide a window through which we can understand where humanity stands in the vastness of the time of the earth.

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