Artists in Residence

Alina Arshi obtained her BA in Contemporary Dance from La Manufacture in Lausanne, where she is now based. Her questions currently orbit around feelings of solitude in profiles with complex statuses, such as within the family unit, and geographies. Her BA project examined the social and class architecture surrounding second-order immigrants, specifically relatives of migrant workers in host countries. «Entepfuhl» was presented at the 2023 edition of Les Urbaines and is currently on tour. 

Alina Arshi's residency takes place in cooperation with Théâtre Arsenic in Lausanne. The residency is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Petra Serhal is a multidisciplinary artist and performer creating multisensorial installation performances and choreographies. Her work draws from her ongoing research on the experiential aspect of performance and on the role of the audience and their bodies in the performative and choreographed experience.

Her work often deals with language, sound and scent in relation to movement and space while seeing the body as an archive, and addressing notions of fragmentation, and absence.

As an artist born and living in Lebanon, the body - its history, its quotidian, and its movement - has been the focus of her research. Thus, she has been experimenting with choreography through research and live performances. Her work ranged from researching the history of political assassinations to the economic history in Lebanon and its collapse in 2020, and how such events affect the body movement. Her research also led her to explore the political dimension of scent and it effect on our bodies. Throughout her career, she was keen in experimenting with different artistic forms to present her work, using performance installations, sculptures, live performance, dance, multimedia, sound installations and olfactory art. In her projects, Serhal has collaborated with different researchers from different fields of study likes a physicist, chemists, economists and historians.

Jean-Daniel Piguet is a director, writer and performer. He grew up in a small village in the countryside (Negrefoyt), in south-west France, and is currently developing an artistic residency project there. He lives in Lausanne, where he trained as a stage director at the Manufacture HETSR - a course in which he now works as an instructor. He has written and directed three shows Pas Perdus (2016), Passe (2018) and Partir (2021), which explore the fictional potential of everyday life. He is currently pursuing his artistic research by examining the relationship between verbal and non-verbal communication. In doing so, he continues to explore how to use the tools of theatre to reveal the complexity and delicacy of human relationships. 

He enjoys working collaboratively, and has led projects with a number of artist friends, including Rémi Dufay, Yan Duyvendak, Oscar Gomez Mata, Maxime Gorbatchevsky, Mélina Martin, Camille Mermet, Floriane Mésenge, Marion Duval and Eleonore Bonah. 

Jean-Daniel Piguet's residency takes place in cooperation with Théâtre Saint-Gervais in Geneva. The residency is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Mati Jhurry’s practice concerns the tension between exoticism and the exotified; the labour and politics involved in selling escape, the performativity within luxury experience and the commodification of care. 
The postcolonial realities of her home island, Mauritius, are veiled by images of a tropical island paradise.  Mati engages with desire, escapism and aspirational culture in search of grasping the representational machine of the “dream island”. 
During her 3-month residency, Mati Jhurry will research the mechanics and aesthetics of luxury experience when palm trees and turquoise waters are replaced by snow covered alps and ski resorts.

Her artistic practice consistently explores the intersection of photographic imagery as a foundation for performative or sculptural installations. Spirina’s curiosity lies in images that have been displaced, converted, filtered, distorted, augmented, or automatised and the relationship these images have with the performing body.

Currently, her interests are centered around the transition between physical performance stagings, their documentation and metadata towards the digitalisation of performances. Just as the photographic image has been reshaped by its recent digital and networked transformations, Spirina observes that the human body has similarly lost its ability to remain spatially fixed. Throughout her works, she seeks to mediate this sense of placelessness and find appropriate tools to position the body and its image within today’s ever-elusive hyper-connected environments.

In 2017 Francesca started her personal artistic research, creating in 2018 the performance installation of long duration based on the action of jumping EXP: je voudrais commencer par sauter. In 2019 she co-creates with Alan Alpenfelt Mein Vater Erzählt Mir Jeden Sonntag Unsere Neun Planeten, a 24-hours radio and performance installation inspired by Space. In 2021 she creates Out of Me, Inside You (semifinalist at PREMIO Schweiz 2020), a live set celebrating the state of melancholy and includes the listening of the vinyl Out of Me, Inside You. Il tempo di rivoluzione è un giro attorno al sole (2022), an original sound work. A complementary project to these productions is «Happening»: a series of non-repeatable performances created for a specific context as well as a limited budget and time with the aim of focusing on the encounter between artists rather than the often controversial and complex production process. 

In 2022 Francesca was nominated for the Swiss Performance Art Award with the performance Out of Me, Inside You. 

She is co-founder of the movement TIB - Ticino is Burning (Swiss Performing Arts Awards 2022) putting into practice an exercise of providing space for opportunities, encounter and exchange besides action and critical reflection.  

Francesca Sproccati's residency takes place in cooperation with LAC Arte e Cultura Lugano. The residency is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Yuck Miranda’s work is spanning film and TV acting, theatre, music and vocal work, movement, dance, choreographing, directing, and teaching. Uniting their versatility and experiences in documentary direction, performances centered in the body and its expression through movement, sound and pacing, and facilitation of complex dialogues, gathered many technical and practical experiences throughout his participation in internationally renowned events, and through working with the biggest theatre and dance companies in South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Portugal, France, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Brazil, Japan, but never forgetting their origins and investing in the performance arts community in Mozambique.  

Yuck attended the Visa Pour La Création Residency in 2019, received the Prince Claus Seed Award in 2021, was recognized as one of ASSITEJ International’s Next Generation Alumni in 2022, and was awarded a Pro-Helvetia Research Residency in 2023, which Yuck’ll be attending in the second half of 2024. 

Having focused the last few years on developing Non-Identified Identities, a project that aims to showcase the narratives of members of the LGBTQ+ community in countries that are deemed “safe” for queer people, his research is currently focused on reflecting about the queer figures that existed before colonialism came to Africa, while colonialism was installed, and after independence, particularly in Mozambique and sub-Saharan Africa, which are closer to his identity and experiences as a queer person in the world. 

Their work navigates the interplay between self-perception and external perceptions. They evoke a spectrum of dramatic and subtle emotions, often ambiguous or contradictory.  

They intervene on mundane objects, such as toilet paper, tights, yoghurt’s cup or razors in order to give those floating feelings a palpable materiality. As some like to say: «Facts don’t care about feelings», here feelings are facts. Their performance «Less Tears! More Actions!» was part of the Premio prize and premiered at la Bâtie-Festival in 2023. They perform concert throughout Switzerland in venue such Les Urbaines, Festival de la cité or Endless Bazaar. They produced music for performers such as Lisa Laurent and Baptiste Cazaux and Pauline Coquart. Since 2022, they have been an associated artist at L’Abri.  

Nelson Schaub's residency takes place in cooperation with L`Abri in Geneva. The residency is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.