ERCF Residencies

ERCF brings artists, composers, filmmakers, and writers together in Budapest. Creating together is our precious methodology. The work made here becomes part of the cultural history of Europe.

A residency is time and shelter and company. It is the slow form of cultural production, the one that the contemporary art economy has the least patience for, and the one Roma artists have the least access to. We hold the time open. The flat, the studio, the table, the evening hours when work stops and the conversation begins, the season long enough that a piece of work can change shape before it leaves.

The residency is also a place of belonging. Roma artists working in isolation in their own cities arrive here and find themselves among their own, sometimes for the first time. The composer meets the painter, the filmmaker meets the writer, the elder meets the emerging artist who has read her work and never expected to share a kitchen with her. Friendships form. Working alliances form. A network forms that will outlast the residency by decades, because the people inside it now know each other not as names on a panel but as company.

This matters beyond the work itself. Roma communities have been kept apart from one another by borders, by languages, by the political weather of the countries we live in. Bringing artists into one room across those divisions is a small act of repair. The connections made here become the cooperations of the next ten years, the joint exhibitions, the co-authored books, the cross-border projects that hold the field together.

Image: Robert Gabris: The Sewingroom, ,60 x 11 m, interactive installation of 9 drawings with colored pencil on paper and ​one 50 x 50 cm drawing, colored pencil on paper, Vienna / Övik / Budapest 2017. https://gallery8.org/en/news/2/147/robert-gabris