Welcome Session

Inside the first gathering of the Creators in Landscapes Global Residency

"If you could take us anywhere in the world, where would you take us?"

Not necessarily somewhere famous, or somewhere people expect you to love. A landscape that has shaped you. A place you carry in memory. Somewhere that changed how you understand the world.

That invitation helped open the Creators in Landscapes Global Residency, bringing together nearly 60 artists, makers, researchers and creative practitioners from around the world.

Hosted by the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) and Infinity Village Lab (IVL), our October 29 welcome session began with people rather than portfolios: where we were joining from, what we were curious about, and what others might never discover by searching for our work online.

It was an introduction to the cohort. It was also a first encounter with the residency’s central question:

Can a creative encounter change how someone relates to a landscape? How might we recognise what changes?

A landscape is more than a view

A landscape can be a home, a livelihood, a place of refuge or a site of conflict. It holds ecological relationships alongside memories, histories and competing claims. People can occupy the same place without having the same access to it, authority over it or hopes for its future.

Working with landscapes therefore involves more than understanding what is physically there. It also involves asking what people notice, what they value and whose knowledge informs decisions.

Creative practice offers one way into those questions.

A story might draw attention to a relationship that has gone unrecognised. A sound work might invite someone to listen differently to a familiar environment. A participatory encounter might bring contrasting experiences of the same place into conversation.

None of these possibilities guarantees transformation. An encounter might deepen a connection, unsettle an assumption, provoke disagreement or leave someone unmoved.

The residency begins with that openness. Its ambition is not simply to make art about landscapes, but to explore how creative practice can become a way of inquiry into our relationships with them.

An atlas of the places we carry

During the welcome session, residents moved into their Crews: smaller groups of approximately six people who will accompany one another throughout the programme.

Our first task was to build a collective atlas of meaningful places.

One person described a landscape. Others listened and translated elements of that account into a shared visual map. What might we see there? What would we hear? What feelings, memories or relationships gave the place its significance?

The exercise placed a small but important distance between a place, someone’s experience of it and another person’s interpretation.

That distance matters. Listening to an account of a landscape is not the same as knowing it. Drawing someone else’s story involves choices about what to include, what to emphasise and what may remain beyond our understanding.

The atlas was therefore not a comprehensive representation of the places depicted. It was a record of the cohort’s accounts: a starting point for discovering what each person brings to the residency, and what others might learn to notice.

It also introduced a question that will follow the work beyond the session: when we represent a place, whose perspective are we making visible? What might we be leaving out?

Start small enough to learn

The residency invites many forms of practice: artworks, films, sound pieces, publications, research inquiries, participatory encounters and digital interventions.

The shared expectation is not a particular medium. It is a willingness to move an idea into practice and learn from what happens.

Residents are encouraged to find the smallest meaningful version of an idea that can be developed, shared and revised.

Ambitious enough to matter. Small enough to happen.

This approach leaves room for a project to change direction. An encounter may work differently than its maker imagined. Feedback may expose a missing perspective. An unsuccessful experiment may reveal that the original question needs to change.

The value lies not only in producing a finished work, but in understanding the decisions, relationships and discoveries that shape it.

Three Studios will support that process:

• Storytelling as Infrastructure — November 12: how stories shape our experience of places and open possibilities for new relationships.

• Land as Belonging — November 26: what connects people to landscapes, to one another and to the other beings that depend on them.

• Creative Impact and Evaluation — December 10: how to recognise and document possible changes in attention, interpretation and behaviour.

Connection is part of the working structure

A global cohort brings many perspectives together. It does not automatically create the conditions for meaningful exchange.

The residency is organised around three connected spaces: the full cohort, larger thematic Congregations and smaller Crews. Together, they provide different settings for encountering unfamiliar ideas, exploring shared interests and returning to a consistent group with unfinished work.

Crews are not teams required to produce a single collective artwork. They are spaces for questions, feedback, resources and support.

The welcome session also introduced agreements for working together: make space and take space, listen to understand, challenge ideas while caring for people, respect what others share, and practise consent and attribution.

As projects develop, those principles will raise questions beyond the cohort itself. What does it mean to create with a place rather than use it as a setting? Who should help shape a project? What permissions are needed? Who can question how a community or landscape is portrayed?

“Creating with” becomes meaningful through how those questions are addressed.

A record of making is a starting point for learning

Residents will use HEALIX, a phygital platform developed by Infinity Village Lab, to support documentation through a Process Journal.

The journal offers a place to record how an idea develops, what happens when it meets the world and what the maker learns along the way. It connects the finished work to the questions, experiments and revisions behind it.

It also brings an important distinction into view: learning about a creative process is not the same as demonstrating its effects on other people.

Someone may describe a powerful experience without changing their behaviour. They may notice something new without developing a lasting attachment. They may interpret the work in a way its maker never anticipated.

These are different possibilities, not interchangeable signs of success.

The residency’s evaluation questions therefore matter as much as its creative ambitions. What happened? For whom? What do participants say about the encounter? What remains uncertain?

The challenge is to take those questions seriously without reducing an artwork to a single score or treating every meaningful response as proof of lasting change.

The residency opens a wider setting for a question Infinity Village Lab is also exploring through a study in development with designers and scientists at Georgia Tech: how might cultural encounters shape people's relationships with place? Process Journals can help surface questions and patterns worth investigating. Understanding effects on audiences, however, requires evidence beyond the maker's account.

Now comes the creating

The first gathering established a shared inquiry and introduced the people who will explore it.

The next stage will bring that inquiry into particular places, practices and encounters. Residents will make choices, meet responses and return to their questions with more to work from than they had at the beginning.

We do not yet know what their projects will reveal. That uncertainty is not a reason to abandon rigour. It is a reason to pay attention.

The map has begun to take shape.

Now comes the creating.

The Creators in Landscapes Global Residency is a collaboration between the Global Landscapes Forum and Infinity Village Lab, bringing creative practice into conversations about landscapes, belonging and change.