The call for artist residencies for ‘Art of Remembrance’ officially closed on 5 February 2025 at midnight, marking a significant milestone in the project’s development. We received 190 applications from 50 different countries, reflecting a strong interest from artists across disciplines, including visual arts, sculpture, photography, digital arts, installation, and performance. This diversity of approaches highlights the potential for a wide range of artistic interpretations of WWII history and memory.
The ‘Art of Remembrance’ project offers four artists the opportunity to take part in a residency at one of four WWII remembrance sites across Europe: Sybir Memorial Museum (Poland), La Coupole WWII Museum (France), Nuto Revelli Foundation in Paraloup (Italy), and the Bastogne War Museum (Belgium). These sites, each with its own historical significance, will serve as a backdrop for artistic creation, allowing artists to engage with archives, artifacts, and local narratives as they develop new works.
Residencies will take place between May 2025 and January 2026, providing selected artists with time and space to reflect on their practice while exploring the relationship between contemporary art and local history and memory. Throughout their stay, they will interact with museum staff, historians, and the local community, enriching their creative process. As part of the program, artists will also lead public workshops, including at least one specifically designed for young audiences, encouraging engagement and dialogue around their artistic interpretations of history.
The final works created during these residencies will become part of a traveling exhibition, ensuring that the artistic outcomes reach audiences beyond the residency locations. This exhibition will tour multiple venues, allowing visitors across Europe to experience contemporary perspectives on WWII remembrance and reflect on the evolving role of memory in shaping our understanding of the past.
With the application phase now complete, the selection process is underway. A jury of experts in contemporary art, history, and curation will carefully evaluate each submission to choose the four artists whose proposals best align with the project’s vision. The selected artists will be announced in early April 2025, after which they will begin preparing for their residencies.
