Pedra Azul Social Art Residency



About
 Process
Residency team
 Participants
 Partners

We live in a time marked by multiple forms of disconnection: from ourselves, from others, and from the world. In different parts of the planet, we witness the weakening of community bonds, a loss of meaning, social polarization, and an increasing difficulty in imagining other ways of living together. It is from this context that the Pedra Azul Social Art Residency emerges: as a space for investigation, experimentation, and shared creation, interested in exploring how we can expand the ways we perceive, imagine, and relate to the world.


The residency was inspired by different lines of thought that invite us to question dominant ways of living and to cultivate plurality. Ailton Krenak, when speaking of a kind of contemporary monoculture, helps us recognize how our ways of living can become impoverished when we reduce the diversity of ways of existing. Geni Nuñez invites us to think about the possibility of reforesting worlds, creating conditions for other forms of existence, knowledge, coexistence, and belonging to flourish. These and other references — including Davi Kopenawa, Timothy Morton, and contemporary discussions around polycrisis — formed part of the field of thought that inspired the residency and helped shape its central question: How can we make other possible worlds visible?
Process                   Me with my Myself         Me with the Other         Me with the World         Impact
Over four days, the process was organized into three movements: Me with Myself, Me with the Other, and Me with the World.

The first movement, Me with Myself, was dedicated to arrival. Before creating with others, we created a space to notice who we are, how we arrive, and how we relate to the place. The experience began in direct contact with the landscape of Pedra Azul, among the mountain, nature, and coffee plantations, expanding our perception of ourselves and of the territory.
In the second movement, Me with the Other, the investigation turned toward relationships. It was here that we explored different ways of practicing collective dreaming. Dreamscape, developed by Ddaniela Aguilar, used dreams, symbols, and landscape as materials for creating unexpected relationships. Later, the Listening Collaboratory, proposed by Faetusa Tirzah, opened a space for asking, conversing, and bringing words, images, and references into relation. In both cases, the process did not begin from a predefined outcome, but from the possibility of noticing what could emerge from encounter.  
The third movement, Me with the World, opened a space for the group itself to experiment with collective creation. A creative laboratory was dedicated to exploring what happens when we stop thinking of a work as the sum of individual contributions and allow something new, unexpected, and belonging to the collective to emerge. It was also a moment to confront the challenges of this practice and ask: what, in fact, is collective work?
From the beginning, the residency was conceived not as a space focused on producing finished artworks, but as a space for process. Participants received notebooks to record perceptions, images, thoughts, and events throughout the days. At the end, these individual records were revisited as part of something that had been collectively constructed.

For this reason, the outcomes of the residency cannot be reduced to a single artwork or final product. They also exist in the relationships that were built, the questions that remained open, the perceptions that shifted, and what emerged unexpectedly from the encounter between people, territory, and different ways of seeing and imagining the world
The Pedra Azul Social Art Residency therefore understands social art as a process of transformation and immersion of a group in contact with the human and the more-than-human. A process involving listening, experimentation, creation, and, above all, the possibility of allowing ourselves to be affected by difference.

Perhaps imagining other possible worlds begins precisely there: in the possibility of encountering what is different from us, allowing ourselves to be affected by other people, visions, and cosmologies, and, through this encounter, developing new forms of relation, care, and belonging.
Duration:

4 days

Format:

in-person

Participants:

13 residents

Where:

Pedra Azul, Espírito Santo

Outcome:

The residency concluded with a group discussion, a public presentation of the processes developed throughout the residency, a conversation with participants, and the closing of the exhibition O Que Sente o Coração at KHAS.
Residency team
Ddaniela Aguilar
Saulo di Tarso
Faetusa Tirzah
Ricardo Dutra
Participants
Artists, researchers, and art educators gathered in Pedra Azul for four days of shared inquiry and creation. Through practices of listening, collective dreaming, and artistic experimentation, participants explored different ways of perceiving and imagining the world, bringing their experiences and the landscape into dialogue with the possibilities of creating other worlds together.
Partners


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