Metamorphosis: Adjusting in a New Tempo
ArquetopiaSUMMER 2025
International 4-Week Academic Residency Program
Includes Critical Seminars & Art Production
Program Dates: 4 weeks – July 14 to August 11, 2025
Applications are processed and selected in the order in which they are received.This comprehensive, customized and prestigious 4-week critical residency program offers competitive professional opportunities for emerging and mid-career, national and international artists, curators, art educators, art historians, and students age 22 and over.
ArquetopiaSUMMER, our flagship residency, is an intensive international critical program aimed at expanding artistic practices through the application of new methodologies and innovative approaches. The goal is to recenter ethics in the process of creating images while rethinking creative practices through Arquetopia’s methodology and program framework, by intersecting academic knowledge, scholarly discourse, and local epistemologies. For its 15th anniversary, ArquetopiaSUMMER 2025 will focus on theme “METAMORPHOSIS: Adjusting in a New Tempo” to reconsider the power of rhythm within the creative process.
As Maria Stepanova writes “What do I have against images? Perhaps it is that they all have the same flaw: euphoric amnesia. They no longer remember what they signify, where they come from, who they are related to, and yet none of this bothers them.” Over the course of this 4-week residency, participants will question images by engaging in a deep analysis of their practice through the lens of radical theory across research, production, and recontextualization. This residency nurtures interactions that stimulate artistic growth and collaboration among participants, blending critical methodologies with artistic practices, encouraging participants to challenge and question existing paradigms. Through engaging with various themes, conducting research, and encountering diverse voices, participants foster a vibrant exchange of ideas.
The ArquetopiaSUMMER 2025 International Academic Residency Program (with Critical Seminars, and Self-Directed Art Production) is a prestigious 4-week critical program that offers competitive professional opportunities for local and international emerging and mid-career artists, curators, art educators, art historians, and students age 22 and over.
ArquetopiaSUMMER 2025 will focus on the questions of art and how images become animated by political desire, while also exploring the notion of rhythm within artistic practices to expand the dimension of artistic agency. To adjust in a new tempo in terms of rhythm, not only involves adaptation, but active participation in the process of acclimating to the new tempo. It implies more than just accommodating oneself but actively engaging within a new temporal framework. As the world has changed, becoming more and more complex, we continuously experience the need to adapt, contest, and survive. What does it mean to be an artist in this unsafe modern world, constantly threatened by the rise of nationalism, environmental extinction, and oppression; particularly when knowing that our work will be appropriated by the narratives of power? Is it possible to interrupt that legacy of Empire and reshape the realm of possibilities of art?
Special Guest Scholars and Artists-in-Residence in program seminars, tours and technique workshops
CRITICAL METHODOLOGIES
The methodology of ArquetopiaSUMMER 2025 embodies a dynamic approach rooted in intuition. To rethink the work is to understand it as always new and surprising, challenging all assumptions that issues are settled, conversations ended, or scores finished. The method departs from a radical commitment to questioning the world in which we appear by engaging academic knowledge with the experimental aspect of artistic practices allowing a space for potentiality. The goal is to acknowledge the transformative power of embracing risk and vulnerability by viewing rhythm as an engaging relationship between the viewer and the artist, rather than art as an object in itself. By embracing nonlinear modes of thought, Arquetopia’s methodology acknowledges rhythm as the tension between sounds and silences, a powerful and necessary space, to explore the intricate interplay between intuition and our artistic practice. In this model, the process of improvisation itself becomes the artifact, highlighting the fluidity and dynamism inherent in creative expression.
This unique program will offer critical methodologies for diverse art practices while exploring the problematics and implications when art and political desire intersect. Participants will conceptualize their art by engaging their practice in critical discussions and exploring the possibilities and limitations of intention in the process of articulating artistic agency. One of the central goals is to understand how violence is constructed through the language of aesthetics, hierarchies, and categories. The program will also put into context the role of cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, in the production of meaning through objects, social relations, and art consumption.
SEMINARS, TOURS & SITE-SPECIFIC INTERVENTIONS
The seminars, master classes, collective critiques, and tours included in the program will delve into the complexities of visual culture and the potential for resistance using the concept of rhythm and artistic agency. Through a pedagogical approach that prioritizes learning through teaching, participants will have the chance to enrich their artistic practice through theoretical discussions, critical dialogues, and the sharing of ideas and questions, thereby contextualizing their artistic practice within a broader community.
Special Guest Scholars and Artists-in-Residence in program seminars and museum visits
ARQUETOPIASUMMER 2025 PROGRAM ITINERARY
This program comprises 21 seminar hours and reading discussions, 6 hours of site-specific master classes, 5 hours of collective critiques, two methodological one-on-one mentoring sessions, 4-6 hours of presentations and community dialogues, as well as guided tours and visits to prominent museums and relevant sites in Puebla. Additionally, the program will feature a public program aimed at engaging with the local artistic community, organized through an open process to connect artists with diverse audiences across various venues. These venues include academic classrooms within a university setting, as well as dialogues and conversations held in an independent gallery and community-based space. Activities are designed to promote intense creative work and artistic dialogue; therefore, artists allocate self-directed studio hours as part of their weekly schedule.
Renowned international art historians, artists, and experts facilitate the dialogues, individual and collective critiques, seminars, and masterclasses. Seminars are conducted in English.
ARQUETOPIASUMMER 2025
FIVE INTERNATIONAL GUEST SCHOLARS & INSTRUCTORS
(USA)
Kirsten Pai Buick, Ph.D., Kirsten Pai Puick, Ph.D., Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick is a distinguished scholar specializing in the visual and material culture of the first British Empire and its diaspora in the US, Caribbean, and India. She holds the position of Professor of Art History and is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Buick earned her B.A. in Art History and Italian Literature from the University of Chicago in 1985. She received her M.A. in Art History in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Art History in 1999 from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on Mary Edmonia Lewis, advised by Sharon F. Patton and George Gurney. Her teaching includes courses on British Colonial and U.S. Art, American Landscape representation, African American Art, and Pro- and Anti-Abolitionist Images in the Atlantic World. She also offers seminars on topics like Photographing Jim Crow, Patronizing Women, and The Victorian Nude. Her research interests span histories of science, medicine, religion, monuments, public space, and the racialization of mobility. Dr. Buick has published extensively on African American art history. She is currently working on two manuscripts: “In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism,” and “Surveying American Art: A History of the Visual Cultures of White Racial Formation, 1675-1876.” In 2022, Dr. Buick was honored as a College Art Association Distinguished Scholar.
(Mexico)
Francisco Guevarais a visual artist, independent scholar and curator based in Mexico and Peru. He specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects, and the analysis of performativity in contemporary art practices. His experience spans more than 20 years of designing, curating, and managing art projects through visual arts education, and international cooperation to promote social change. His essays and critical texts focus on place and history as ideological distortions, and address subjects such as contemporary art practices, historiography of art, and the artist residency field, and have been featured in numerous international publications. As of 2009, Guevara is co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Arquetopia, a non-profit foundation and transnational artist residency program promoting Development and social transformation through educational, artistic, and cultural programs.
As a visual artist, Guevara investigates the historical construction of the differentiation processes, embodiment, and the concept of distortion through a wide range of artistic/historical mediums, including painting, installation, and metalsmith. Protégé of Dolores Olmedo Patiño his work can be found in important private and public collections. He has participated in multiple collective exhibits and had nineteen solo shows, including the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque Museum and University of New Mexico in the U.S., and the 10th Mexican Festival in Australia. His work can be found in important private and public collections such as: Fundación Coleccion Jumex, Dolores Olmedo Museum, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Ministry of Culture of Bolivia, Salma Hayek-Pinault Collection, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II Private Collection, Denmark, among others. His residencies and honors include THE LAND/an art site, Youkobo Art Space Japan, and the American Institute of Architects Honor Award, both New Mexico and Albuquerque.
(Palestine)
Karim Kattan, Ph.D., is a writer with a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Paris Nanterre University. In French, his books include a collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur (2017), and a novel, Le Palais des deux collines (2021), which were both published by the Tunis-based Éditions Elyzad. Le Palais des deux collines was awarded the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie in 2021 and was shortlisted for many other literary awards. In English, his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Maine Review, +972 Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge, The Funambulist, Words Without Borders, The Baffler, and more. He was one of the co-founders and directors of el-Atlal, an arts and writing residency in the oasis of Jericho in Palestine. His writing was featured in various art spaces, exhibitions, and biennales, including the MMAG Foundation in Amman, Bétonsalon in Paris, B7L9 in Tunis, Arquetopia in Puebla, Art Kulte in Rabat, the Berlinale Forum in Berlin, Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou, and the 58th Venice Biennale.
(USA)
Emmanuel Ortega, Ph.D. (Art History, University of New Mexico), is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library for 2022-2023. As a scholar and curator, Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on images of autos-de-fe, nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States; his latest endeavor is the upcoming exhibition titled Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, opening at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in September of 2022. An essay titled, “The Mexican Picturesque and the Sentimental Nation: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Landscape,” was published by The Art Bulletin in the Summer of 2021. His book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge. He is a recurrent lecturer for Arquetopia Foundation.
(Mexico)
Session of 4 weeks: Monday, July 14 to Monday, August 11, 2025.
WHAT THIS COMPREHENSIVE RESIDENCY PROGRAM INCLUDES
Seminars:
- 21 hours in seminars with guest scholars
- 6 hours of site-specific master classes and guided visits to prominent museums and relevant sites in Puebla
- 5 hours of collective critiques
- Two methodological one-on-one mentoring sessions
- 4-6 hours of presentations and community dialogues
- Additionally, the program will feature a public program aimed at engaging with the local artistic community, organized through an open process to connect artists with diverse audiences across various venues. These venues include academic classrooms within a university setting, as well as dialogues and conversations held in an independent gallery and community-based space
- Activities are designed to promote intense creative work and artistic dialogue; therefore, artists allocate self-directed studio hours as part of their weekly schedule
- Each resident meets weekly with our directorial and curatorial staff for individualized research assistance/resources, project guidance, and group critique
- Furnished, private bedroom
- 24-hour access to the kitchen for residents to prepare their own meals; residents are responsible for their own meals/food
- Wireless Internet
- Use of Arquetopia’s residency common spaces including outdoor terraces
- Shared, serviced bathrooms with modern fixtures and showers
- Housekeeping
- 24-hour access to large and bright, shared art studio with generous natural light
- Personal workspace with large table and wall space
- Some tools provided
- On-site darkroom provided for photographers
- Artists bring their own materials and supplies or obtain them locally
RESIDENCY PROGRAM TUITION INFO & APPLICATION DEADLINES
TO APPLY
Click here to apply for this special residency program.
