Our residency programme is based on three core principles: archives, community and nature.
1: ARCHIVES
2: COMMUNITY
3: NATURE
For us, archives are not only repositories of documents and historical records. They are living sites of inquiry: collections of memories, images, gestures, stories, relationships, and traces. We approach archival practice as a creative and critical tool for artistic research.
Our methodology draws from critical pedagogies, community-based learning, and peer-to-peer exchange. Each cohort brings together participants from different geographies, disciplines, and experiences, creating an international learning community where knowledge is collectively produced rather than transmitted.
Through readings, writing routines, discussions, practical exercises, and project development sessions, participants explore archives as creative tools.
Hosted in the Valencian countryside, the residency invites participants to slow down and step away from the rhythms of productivity and extraction.
We understand attention, presence, care, and enoughness as important conditions for learning, making, and thinking together. Nature is not a backdrop, but an active part of the pedagogical experience: a space to inhabit other temporalities, cultivate attention, and reconnect with our creative processes.
About the residencies:
Archival Bootcamp is a six-day artistic residency. It gather artists, curators and creative professionals from around the world. Combining theory, practice and spare time, we anchor on the power of archives through artistic practice, critical memory and creative writing.
Situated in critical pedagogies, we propose learning communities to produce collective knowledge from our singularities: geopolitical anchorages, ways of doing and transdisciplinary knowledge.
The residency offers:
→ Creative freedom and practical strategies for engaging with archives, using artistic methods and alternative approaches to image-making, memory, and writing.
→ The opportunity to join an international network of artists and creatives.
→ Access to a curated selection of contemporary references, artists, and theories focused on archives, critical memory, and artistic practice.
[The residency is conducted in English, but our team also speaks Spanish and Català]
How it works?
The residency offers a dynamic blend of individual and collective work, incorporating both theoretical and practical approaches.
→ Thematic Lectures:
We share three theory-practice sessions focused on key themes such as archives, methodologies, and movement. These sessions may include:
❊ Writing routines
❊ Readings on memory, art, and archival practice
❊ Viewing and discussing artistic and archival projects
❊ Exercises centered on creative processes
❊ Practical activities to activate our archives
→ Peer-to-Peer Pedagogical Offerings
Grounded in critical pedagogies and community-based learning, we understand knowledge as something collectively produced rather than transmitted. For this reason, we invite each participant to share a method, exercise, or way of working that shapes their relationship to archives. These pedagogical containers become an opportunity to introduce ourselves through practice rather than formal presentation, creating a space for exchange, experimentation, and collective learning.
→ Mutual Nurturing
We facilitate an open space for project sharing, collective feedback, and process-based reflection for those who wish to participate. Through conversation and attentive listening, we support and enrich each other's projects, questions, and artistic processes.
→ Free Time
We intentionally leave space for siesta, walks, silent reading, rest, and individual project work. We understand slowness, attention, and enoughness as important conditions for artistic practice and collective learning.
Artists, researchers, activists, writers, filmmakers, photographers, curators, archivists, librarians who have an artistic project with archival material, at any stage of production. By archive we mean any collection of images, writings, films, sounds or objects that form an affective and meaningful corpus, eager to be activated and explored. Between ten and fifteen artists are selected, depending on the venue.
For whom?
Community Archive Caretaker Scholarship
Every year, honoring individuals who dedicated their lives to community archives, we will offer one spot for our Community Archive Caretakers Scholarship. Our intention is to support the caretakers who preserve, protect, and activate community memory through their organizations, and to accompany their training as they explore new artistic and archival methodologies to enrich their practice.
In 2026, we celebrated Alieda Verhoeven's archival care work in Mendoza, Argentina. A lesbian Methodist pastor, she dedicated her practice to women's communities and to the struggle for bodily autonomy and sovereignty.
WHO CAN APPLY?
* Archivists who are part of non-profit organizations dedicated to the care of community archives and who wish to integrate artistic approaches into their archival work.
The scholarship covers the full program + all meals for one person (travel not included).
Please contact us if you have any questions! hola@archivalbootcamp.com