OPEN CALL FOR ARTIST RESIDENCY

The project ‘Museum of the Commons’ is engaged in key challenges of contemporary societies; the emphasis of the residency programme is placed on climate crisis, shared resources, and the role of the museum as an organisation built into local social and environmental ecosystems. With climate as the starting point – not only as an environmental, but also as a social and spatial relation, the residency explores how artistic practices can open up space for different forms of care, responsibility, and joint action.

Since 2021, through the project ‘Meeting Point’, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb explores how the museum can be a lively place of meeting and joint action, as well as an actor that intertwines with the city, establishes relations and makes contact with different communities, and not only an edifice or an exhibition venue. Since 2026, the project builds on Museum Garden / Edible Museum, the artistic and permacultural project by Andreja Kulunčić, developed in collaboration with the community in 2025.

Just like the museum roof was once an unused and hidden resource and is today the museum garden – a place of care, learning, and meeting – the residents are invited to identify similar hidden, neglected or unrecognised resources in the museum’s immediate surroundings – spatial, social, environmental, or temporal – and to study them through shifting the focus, an act of attention, or temporary intervention that makes the invisible visible. We are interested in the manners in which they observe, react, and enter into that which is collective – through action, gesture, stroll, talk, workshop, or temporary activation (or deactivation) of space, which stimulates new views, creates new relationships, or discovers new strata of meaning. The residency is therefore oriented on the process, meeting and exchange, and not on the production of a permanent or exhibitive result.

The research may include the following:

• the museum exterior and public spaces around the MSU
• the surrounding neighbourhoods of Novi Zagreb
• the visible and invisible strata of space, relations, and community
• the relations between the space, the community and the environment, including the local microclimates, seasonalities, and everyday practices of resource use

It is preferable that the research be relevant to the local context and/or participatory – that it include the local community, users of spaces, and members of the Friends of MSU; that it relate to concrete phaenomena, situations or issues; and that it foster dialogue, reflection, and engagement.

The goal of the residency is to evoke the feeling that all of us have influence, that we are surrounded by resources whose potential we are often not aware of, and that change – at least a change in consciousness – can take place through small, attentive and deliberate gestures, especially in the context of the climate crisis and the need for more sustainable forms of joint action. What is stimulated is not an extensive production of new objects, but rather working with that which already exists – spaces, relations, knowledge, materials, and the community.

For more info, contact and how to apply, see here.