This Residency and Cultural Exchange is a timely opportunity to bring artists together who are interested and have experience in working with and engaging communities, to learn from local artists, resilient communities, and from each other. This year, we have chosen the theme Building Communities of Peace in response to the increasing social and political challenges across the planet. We enter this residency and cultural exchange with a few questions: how can we best prepare arts programming that serves the specific communities we work with? How can we properly create a collective voice? What do we need to learn from communities dealing with socio-economic challenges? How do we keep ourselves grounded and balanced as we serve vulnerable communities?

We believe that there needs to be space for each individual artist to explore their own discipline and make important connections with local artists and organizations in order to explore future collaborations and create more cultural exchange opportunities to present their work in Colombia. For this reason, the Community Arts Residence and Cultural Exchange is an opportunity to expand a network of artists committed to social change and social justice— artists willing to use their talents and skills in favour of building strong communities of peace.