Artist Residencies – MaréMotrice

Taking artists to the sea, to islands or around icebergs has a particularity: it is their job to feel the place and what happens there, it is their job to transmit what they see and experience, on a sensory and emotional level.

Summer 2025 residency: Cancelled

Applications that we received for 2025 are kept for when our residency program will launch again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Please contact us for more info: benjamin@maremotrice.ch

Since 2016, non-profit MaréMotrice has been organizing artist residencies on board a 15-meter expedition sailboat. The proposed approach consists in confronting different perspectives on the polar regions. These trips take place collectively, four artists and one or two crew members live and work for three to four weeks on a few square metres.

For an artists’ laboratory on the high seas

Have you ever been told about the quality of light up there at the pole? Have you ever been described the sound of ice cubes hitting each other in the mist? And the color of an overturned iceberg, how is that? There is an urgent need to interpret and note this: when everything is transformed, who will tell us about it?

We intend to carry out a real subjective documentation work on the changing polar regions. There is a fair amount of scientific data on global warming, ice melting, the evolution of polar fauna, but very few artistic traces are organized.

It is through the eyes of artists, with multiple languages, that we want to print and engrave these images. Artists whose work challenges us, whom we wish to take to sea, from one iceberg to another. Creators who will surprise us and make us dream by immersing ourselves in the places that are so dear to us.

By organizing these expeditions, the association aims to document climate change in the ocean and polar regions and to take a look at the human communities living near the poles. All this by inviting on board a diversity of perspectives and means of expression: filmmakers, visual artists, illustrators, painters, photographers, engravers, writers, etc.

MaréMotrice organizes one or two residencies per summer, lasting three to four weeks. Funding is provided partly by the association when it obtains grants, and partly by the artists -who must seek for funding by themselves. The 2025 residency is on the tracks. Deadline for application: october 1st 2024

Contact benjamin@maremotrice.ch / +33 7 847 280 42