Sur o No Sur 2024

About ↓

Sur o No Sur is a proposal for collective learning — an experiment in sharing and rethinking knowledge between us through guided practices, dialogue, and exploration. Modeled as three-week residency - learning programs held during the summer, the program brings in a selection of visiting artists to act as guides and facilitators.  

Sur o No Sur results from 8 years of residency programs that have welcomed participants from 6 continents, 50 countries and vastly different histories, fields, and experiences. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from and share space with each of these people.  Now we’re collaboratively developing this experimental “school” to invite others to learn and practice alongside these inspiring and reflective artists as well as each other.

Sur o No Sur aims to offer a structured yet intuitive platform for artistic exchange and a space outside traditional institutions to question and engage with the form in which we and our work can exist and evolve.  The program values and prioritizes the non-traditional / traditional knowledge that stems from our own communities, histories and territories and offers time for experimental dialogue, learning, and making without defined expectation.

Sur o No Sur 2024 ↓

Session One / June 3-21, 2024 : A Story is Never Just a Story

Visiting Artists: Megan Paulin / E. Medina / Gabriela Ortega

  • During this session participants together with the guiding artists will explore the many ways and resources that can be used to tell a story. By understanding how place and lineage inform the stories we tell, how we can utilize our environment to support those narratives, and the many forms in which these can be shared, the group will question traditional notions of storytelling and together learn new ways of crafting stories that impact the present and future of our communities.

    Week One: Megan Paulin / aadizookewinini = storyteller / June 3-7

    By exploring the themes around Indigenous food sovereignty, self-governance, and our relationship to food through storytelling, we are able to track environmental changes, and at the same time participate in community building, climate change mitigation, and decolonization.

    Through a series of practices that include printmaking, storytelling, and seed saving participants will take part in a series of workshops that allow them to engage in a cross-discipline, line blurring, multi-arts exploration of storytelling, food, and its connection to culture, memory, community-building, and place.

    Week Two: E. Medina / Hidden World/Secret Corner: Nurturing and Expanding Creativity and Craft / June 10-14

    The goal of this week is to repair and reinvigorate the relationship to our own creativity, artistry, and craft. By using field recordings, deep listening, and the sharing of knowledge, participants will undertake a set of exercises that will help introduce joy, discipline, and concentration to their artistic workflow.

    Through personal and collaborative practices using sound and field recordings, the group will learn how to work and incorporate their immediate environment into their work. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss and share their experiences with impostor syndrome, creative blocks, and how to overcome those insecurities to tell their stories.

    Week Three: Gabriela Ortega / We All Have a Story to Tell, We All Have the Power to Write History/ June 17-21

    During the last week of the session, participants will work with Gabriela to transform and create personal stories and find the right form that fits into their own practice, integrating what was learned in the previous workshops. By decentralizing the book as the main medium where these exist, the group will explore through writing, performance, video, and sound ways to shape and weave together narratives to tell stories from a personal perspective.

  • Megan Paulin (she/her) is an Indigenous artist from Turtle Island (Canada) of Mi'kmaq and Polish descent. She works as a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on community arts and intergenerational art-making with Indigenous theatre and storytelling, including sounds, movement, projections, and video, as well as large-scale sculpture and puppet making. She also works in academic research around Indigenous methodologies and decolonization in writing and the arts. She is part of an ensemble called Aanmitaagzi (which translates to he/she speaks) that hosts live performative events based on traditional and contemporary Indigenous storytelling. She acts as the lead artist for the installation component, however all members work across disciplines co-creating with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members of all ages.

    E. Medina (he/him) is a first-generation Mexican-American electronic music composer, educator, and chocolatier. His work uses a combination of field recordings, spoken word, acoustic instrumentation, and analog synthesizers. His work has been featured in various albums, book releases, literary readings, and live painting sessions. He recently performed in an improvised ensemble for the 2023 [RE]Happening Festival at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. E. is the founder of Voltage Flow, a mobile artist residency that provides participants access and education in the field of modular synthesis. He is also the Head Chocolatier for French Broad Chocolate in Asheville, NC, where he uses his creative exercises for product development, production, and management.

    Gabriela Ortega (she/her) is an award-winning writer/director and actor from the Dominican Republic whose work lives within the intersection of fiction and poetry, aiming to draw cultural bridges that lead to the Caribbean through intersectionality, duality, and ancestral memory. She is a 2023 Sundance screenwriting fellow, a 2022 Sundance interdisciplinary fellow, and a 2022-2023 Academy of Motion Pictures fellow. Her short film Huella was an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is being turned into a feature film after being selected for the 2022 Sundance Producers Lab and the 2023 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. Gabriela was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film; she won the NBC & Telemundo Best Director award at the 2022 LALIFF and “Best New Filmmaker'' at the annual NFMLA awards. Her latest film, Beautiful, FL will premiere on Disney+ in 2023, and her first film, “PAPI'' is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max.

Session Two / July 1-19, 2024 : Exploring a Collective Narrative, Constructing a Collective Future

Visiting Artists: Rennie Jones / Sheetal Prajapati / Noam Keim

  • The second session focuses on how knowledge is inherited, passed down, and shared, how it’s informed by our collective and individual experiences and the capacity these elements have in helping us shape our futures.

    Week One: Rennie Jones / Creating our Collective Future: Artmaking in the Era of Climate Change / July 1-5

    This session asks: what can art do in the face of climate change? Does artmaking need to be action-oriented?

    Through group discussions, individual sketch sessions, technical hand-building workshops, group field trips, and collective art practices, we will explore the relationship between artmaking and the environment. The session will draw on the themes of Climate Futurism to allow participants to analyze possibilities for collective action and consider their role as artists in imagining a sustainable future.

    Week Two: Sheetal Prajapati / The Meaning in Making / July 8-12

    This week’s practices will focus on how making is a critical part of building and sustaining narratives within families, communities, and ourselves. Participants will approach ritual practices as a form of storytelling, questioning how our past informs our present and what it means to take and offer.

    Thinking of the hand as both a tool and an extension of our own ancestry, this session will explore writing, cooking, craft, and ritual as practices that link the past and present within the participants as makers and as a community of learners together.

    Week Three: Noam Keim / Reclaiming the Archive / July 15-19

    During this week, Noam will guide participants to use what they learned in the previous workshops and integrate it by developing a methodology that melds past and future. By taking Land as the starting point to build personal histories, participants will practice together how to trust their bodies and faded memories and see the gaps as opportunities rather than erasures. Through walks, writing practices, shared readings, and conversations, the group will explore what the unknown can teach us about ourselves.

  • Sheetal Prajapati (she/ her) is an educator, artist and advisor working across the field of art and public engagement. Born in Buffalo, New York, Sheetal is a first-generation Indian American. She is currently an advisor and consultant through her agency Lohar Projects working with artists, art workers and cultural organizations. She served as the transitional Executive Director of Common Field from 2021-2022; the first Director of Public Engagement at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn from 2017-2018 and as the Assistant Director of Learning and Artists Initiatives in the education department of The Museum of Modern Art from 2014-2016. From 2007 to 2010, she served as Director of Educational Programs at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University and, prior to that, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2004-2007) where she redeveloped the family and youth programs division.

    Rennie Jones (they/ them) is a non-binary artist and architect currently based in New York. Their architectural work is focused on urban-scale interventions in climate adaptation and resilience. In their sculptural ceramics practice, they center queer subjectivities to explore the tension between self-identification and the external appearance of the body. Their work challenges the assumed relationship between gender and anatomy and questions how societal standards influence perceived value.

    Noam Keim (they/ them) is a writer, medicine maker, and transformative justice practitioner living on Occupied Lenni-Lenape land currently known as Philadelphia. Noam is a trans-Jewish Arab whose life has been shaped by multiple layers of colonialism and migration. They currently run the Center for Carceral Communities where they weave webs of support and liberation with people impacted by the legal system. Their work is inspired by a deep belief that our collective liberation requires healing our relationship to the land. Noam self-publishes a zine called The Land is Holy in which they explore the threads of colonialism, longing, reverence to the natural world, and trauma healing. Their work has been represented in Dardishi, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, Food for Thought, and they are currently working on a collection of essays through Catapult’s Essay Generator program.

Applications are now closed.

  • Sessions run three weeks. In-person guided sessions with visiting artists will be held each morning (more or less 10:30 am-1:30 pm) Monday-Friday. These include, but are not limited to, writing practices, conversational practices, excursions, artist talks, studio visits, films, listening practices. Participants will have the afternoons to work on their own projects and/or respond to the daily practice. Thursday evenings we will host group events related to the workshop topics. Lunch (the main meal) will be provided Monday - Friday, as well as bread and coffee in the morning. Saturday and Sunday are open.

    For those staying at or through Pocoapoco, arrival is the Sunday prior to the program and departure is the Saturday following the program.

  • The cost of participation in the three week program is offered on sliding scale fees as noted below.

    The program fee includes daily lunch Monday - Friday as well as access to the Pocoapoco house but does not include lodging, transportation, or other personal expenses. Through funding support we are able to offer scholarship fees for all national and local participants as well as a limited number of partial scholarships for international participants. International participants who would like to be considered for a scholarship should acknowledge this on the application form.

    We are happy to provide letters of support to any selected applicants who are requesting external funding to cover the costs of their participation.

    The cost of the program is offered on sliding scale fees as follows:

    International participants: $1200 USD

    National participants (Mexican nationals living in Mexico) : $5000 MXN

    Local participants (Mexican nationals living in Oaxaca) : $1000 MXN

    International scholarship participants: $600 USD

    A 50% non-refundable deposit is required to confirm participation.

  • We offer various housing options with sliding fees for program participants

    For more info download the open call.

  • Sur o No Sur is open to participants of all fields, disciplines, locations, and ages (over 21).

    For this program, we require a conversational level of English.