Addressing our own need for some calm and energetic restoration as a cultural practicioners, we decided this year to create a safe space for open and honest conversations about our work and future trajectories. It was a pause for reflection on accomplishments, an opportunity to share doubts and anxieties, and a space to find strength and support in one another.
We extended invitations to a remarkable group of Mexican and International female curators, managers and artists. Together, we experienced meaningful moments and gained insights into each other's work. The profound mutual support and solidarity were both overwhelming and gratifying. A heartfelt thanks to the participants!
It is so rare to get the chance to enter a place so powerful that it demands not just break and disconnection from the everyday, but which fosters healing and connection on a deeper level, with oneself, with others, with nature, and with the passion for what we do and why we do it. Rancho Sarah in Sian Ka’an, Tulum is such a place.
I feel incredibly grateful to have been included in the experience, which even over four short days lodged itself in me in a deep way. It connected me to a country, to a group of incredible women working in the arts, and to a spirit of joy, care, community and generosity that can get so easily forgotten in our industry. Thank you to Sally and Masha and to our whole group for such a vital and memorable experience!
- Leah Turner
There are a lot of elements that make the AKI AORA residency a truly special experience, but the one that felt the most valuable to me was how we treated time. I enjoy working with the quick pace of the arts sector, but it means that taking time - really fully taking it without the limit of a looming deadline, a set outcome, an expected respo2 dnse - is a very rare luxury that we may even forget we should long for. Creating a space that allows for gathering and conversation, that at the same time is somehow lifted out of the normal pace of cultural work, where exchanges are driven by curiosity to learn about another’s practice rather than a desire to formalize something right then and there, makes you sit with it - whatever it may be: an idea, questions, reflections on current past and future projects or just a hint of a feeling for something that had not yet fully presented itself. This practice of sitting with it, of letting something linger, to allow something to be present without immediately dissecting it, I believe, is the best thing to think better, bigger, or maybe differently. A sort of calm and natural confrontation with thinking within this community is a different sort of labour that brings with it a longevity of connection and ideas that has a solid feeling to it. Thank you for having me.
- Charlotte Knaup
