The Godown Residency Programme 2025
OPEN CALL
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The Godown is excited to announce an open call for a new residency programme taking place in 2025. We are seeking creatives and collectives who wish to engage in place-based practices in the entangled topographies of The Godown and its surroundings.
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The residency programme aims to support interdisciplinary conversations and processes of learning, thinking, and making. A series of overlapping residencies will begin from June 2025 onwards. Where possible, residents will share the studio space with other participants with crossover interests.
Eligibility
We invite local and Southeast Asia-based individuals and collectives working across various disciplines, including but not limited to:
• Visual and Performing arts
• Writing
• Architecture
• Natural Sciences
We are seeking proposals which intend to explore and experiment with the spatial, material, and cultural qualities of The Godown and its surrounding areas. Proposed projects can come in a range of forms (text, sound, images, etc), but should aim to be location-specific from the beginning of their conception to their eventual display.
Participants may decide to come in full-time or part-time, but would be expected to set aside roughly 200 hours over the course of one to two months.
An overarching theme
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AIR
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"On the void between spaces not as empty, or actionless, or in fact void at all. Instead as a space that weathers and erodes. An entropic arena that challenges the objects that surround it, including the human form"
The air’s gaseous state allows it to form connections with almost everything. Yet, only through its contact with other matter – objects, surfaces, or living things – does air become visible. If the air of a place is seen as charged, or “in fact [not] void at all,” it might be considered a shared material experience, allowing a space to be explored, or described, through various facets.
In thinking about air as a contact zone, the residency programme hopes to encourage conversations of what makes a place by investigating the ecologies to be found in urban Kuala Lumpur. Air as a lens for research ties closely to The Godown’s spatial qualities, whose openness allows it to act as an urban room where people, things, and nature come into contact with each other.
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Potential avenues of research
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Cycles
Below are some ways in which we have been thinking about The Godown.
Applicants are welcome to submit proposals which put forward new research interests, or build upon these questions:
The elements
The sun, rain, and moon: how does The Godown’s permeability act as a window to the natural processes around us?
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Plants and fungi
What plants and fungi have taken root, and what are their histories?
How do they affect the growth, and decay, of The Godown and the ground beneath it?
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Materials
What are the physical qualities of the space? Where has each material come from, and how have different hands shaped them?
How do the air and atmosphere of the place affect the building’s materials, and why/what do we do to reverse its effects?
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Life, death, and spirits
Who, or what, has come before? Do their traces remain?
How can we recognise our local belief systems, and add another dimension to the idea of the “charged” space of a place?
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Tom Cookson, Shallow Time: The Burren (2023), 103.
For more information and to apply, please refer to the leaflet below:
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Please submit your application using the form here.
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The following documents (in .pdf format) are also required to be submitted via an accessible link (see Question 12 on the application form):
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1. Your CV or resume
2. Your portfolio of recent works (up to 10 works which may include images, text, audio or video links)
3. Your Malaysian IC or passport (for non-Malaysian applicants)
Submission deadline: 30 April 2025.
Selected applicants will be notified by 15 May 2025.
We look forward to receiving your applications and are excited to support creative journeys at The Godown.