The Serai Residency: A Dream and an Offering

Applications open until 5th September 2024

We are beyond excited to announce that applications are now open for the Serai Residency, a dream that we have worked towards and played towards for so long!

For those not in the know, a residency is a particular kind of gift usually offered primarily to writers and artists: a stepping outside of daily life, a protected time and space to make art, and a community of people alongside whom to make it. It’s the kind of thing that often makes no sense in a strictly capitalist understanding of the world — friends keep asking us but what are the deliverables— and yet, that’s the beauty: There are no deliverables. A residency is time and space and breath. A residency is an affirmation that the world needs your voice and your being. A residency is trust.

We have known for a long time now that we wanted to start a residency at Camp Nomad, but it has taken us some time to build out our vision and our infrastructure. For one, we wanted to extend the mandate of a residency beyond artists and writers. We settled (for now) on opening it to educators, community workers, and peace builders in addition to artists and writers: we believe strongly that each of those groups could use the gift of time to zoom out, dig deep into a passion project, rest, find community, and return refreshed to their everyday lives. We also thought about all the residency spaces we have known, nationally and globally, and we made a decision to specifically create a residency program for the Global South: In a world that is still largely mediated by a Western or North American gaze, we loved the creative possibilities of facilitating intense South-South dialogues over the two decades we have in our new campsite.

Then, it came to infrastructure. The residency we dreamed of needs, at a minimum, 4 kinds of spaces: Space to rest, space to work, space to gather in community, and space to daydream. It all needs to be cosy, calming, inspiring, and in tune with our larger ideals of sustainability and accessibility. So we set about designing our mud huts: 2 of them wheelchair accessible, all of them with large bay windows and window seats that look out at the snowcapped Himalayas, cosy fireplaces for cold nights, a light-filled common area with a large fire and lots of books and board games, and plenty of spaces to linger, lie in hammocks, go on walks.

And then, in something that feels just short of a minor miracle, we were also able to raise last minute funding to start our Residency as early as this year! From 25th November to 15th December, 2024, we will be hosting 4 writers, artists, educators and/ or peacebuilders from across the Global South, all expenses paid, and then rallying behind their work and visions for the world we are all trying to build.

So here we go: APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN for the 2024 cohort of the Serai Residency. All details and link to apply here.

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