Are you an artist of migrant heritage exploring environmental and human rights? Are you looking for a fully funded residential to create new work? Would you like to collaborate with artists from European countries? This could be a space for you.

We will learn, reflect, create and explore how to make visible to ‘an everyday audience’ the human and environmental catastrophe of industrial food systems. We will particularly focus on the environmental degradation of the greenhouses in Almeria, Southern Spain, infamously called the Plastic Sea (visible from the moon, picture below). As well as hearing the stories of migrant farm workers employed there to grow the vegetables supplied to supermarkets across Europe.

The Ulex South residency is hosted within the intercultural association La Bolina (Granada) who run a regenerative land project and provide dignified alternatives to the inhumane working conditions that migrants experience in the Plastic Sea. La Bolina is working in collaboration with organisations and artists across Europe creating alternative food growing models and campaigning against the disconnected food system through theatre, events, films and socially engaged art. Workshops will be facilitated by Ulex South, La Bolina and The Change Collective, a UK based organisation looking at how an arts based approach can be a catalyst for social change. 

This residency will be attended by artists, writers and makers who come from a migrant/refugee background, who work in solidarity with migrants and refugees, or who work in arts and ecology or artivism. People who want to develop their experience and capacity in making work that makes a difference. 

Why focus on supermarkets?
Built on the glitz of comfort, speed and cheapness, supermarkets distract from the land and lives destroyed by extractivist global food systems.  Food is one of the most important needs for every human being. The upcoming food crisis is not fiction. Today’s dominant model of industrial agriculture creates dangerously fragile societies and ecosystems. 

Suggested watching: Disconnect video 

What to expect?

Artists from different countries will come together to exchange arts practice and learn about the reality of EU food systems, the invisibilization of migrant workers and the consumers’ complicity in an exploitative system. They will also take part in Ulex South workshops with The Change Collective (UK) and La Bolina’s artistic director Ruth Cross in collaborative and site-specific artistic responses. Artists will make an individual or collective (in small groups) performative, artistic or changemaker response during and after the residency. 

Post residency: 

Documentation of the work will be collated into an exhibition, publication or event supported by Asociacion Solidaria Deserollo Andaluz, Granada, Spain. Artists will be invited to share their work at events for Refugee Week in June 2022, supported by Counterpoints Art – the UK refugee arts network.

The project will provide: 

– Travel to Granada, Southern Spain- including any COVID-19 tests needed. 

– All food, accommodation, bedding and WiFi for the duration of the trip.  

– Travel for all excursions within the residency 

– Translators where necessary

Artists will need to be available for a pre-event call in Feb/March for logistics and content overview, as well as sharing within Refugee Week between June 20th – 26th 2022. They will also be required to: provide their own travel insurance and abide by the COVID regulations at the time of the residency; provide most of their own arts materials; have the necessary travel documents to travel to Spain.

Venue

This training is hosted as part of the Ulex South Project