Amplifying artists through mobility: FUTURES Hub in Amsterdam

Residencies as sites where mobility redistributes opportunities

The growing emphasis on mobility within European cultural policy reflects a broader philosophical shift in how artistic work is understood today. For example, EU’s Creative Europe agenda and the newer mobility fund Culture Moves Europe position cross-border circulation as a driver of innovation, diversity, and cultural resilience. Platforms such as TransArtists supports artists in finding and navigating artist-in-residence (AiR) programmes worldwide. It offers a comprehensive database of residencies, practical information on funding and application processes, and aims to make international mobility for artists more accessible and manageable. This mirrors arguments made by scholars such as Pascal Gielen, whose influential volume “The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude” (2009) describes the contemporary art world as a transnational network sustained by temporary gatherings, residencies, and collaborative projects. Gielen’s concept of the ‘common’ as a cultural space resonates strongly with residency models. The common refers to resources, practices, or spaces that are shared, managed, and cared for collectively by a community rather than owned privately or controlled exclusively by the state. It emphasizes mutual responsibility, access, and cooperation, turning shared assets into something sustained and reproduced through collective use and stewardship.

Alternatively, a growing body of literature reflects on residencies themselves as cultural forms. “Re-tooling Residencies” (Elfving, Kokko, and Gielen 2019) is perhaps the most incisive contribution, examining residencies as laboratories functioning as alternative institutions neither fully within nor outside the art world’s traditional structures, and how this ambiguity gives them both flexibility and fragility. Residencies enable alternative modes of production, support long-term research, and articulate new ethics of care and community.

Taken together, these perspectives reveal how the FUTURES Amsterdam Residency situates itself in this context and participates in a larger reimagining of how culture is produced, supported, and circulated. Residencies are becoming essential political and artistic infrastructures: spaces where mobility becomes a method and a redistribution tool where artistic research is nurtured rather than rushed. Throughout 2025, FUTURES Hub in Amsterdam has welcomed ten residents to inhabit the space and connect with a new network to experiment and not solely produce new work.

For Thana Faroq, Yemeni-born photographer, writer, and educator living in the Netherlands, residencies enable reflection and experimentation away from the pressure of formal expectations. At FUTURES Hub, Faroq continued working on her short film “Imagine Me Like a Country of Love,” born from the fault line between expectations and reality of returning to her homeland after nearly ten years. Working with a variety of mediums including film, photography, writing, and animation, the residency allowed Faroq to deconstruct her multidisciplinary approach, focusing on process rather than outcome. From the way each medium informs the other, and how their uses speak to specific emotions in the story, to how composition reveals structural patterns, the artist was able to “articulate previously instinctive methodologies”, in her words, and find new confidence through the sharing of work in progress.

Hiền Hoàng, Vietnamese multimedia artist based in Germany, regards her experience at FUTURES Hub as essential space that allowed her to shift from technical, scientific research toward a more poetic approach. There, she explored the colonial history of tree migration in the Netherlands, focusing on the Japanese Pagoda Tree which, according to archival notes at the Hortus Botanicus Leiden, was first introduced to the Netherlands in 1747. Uncovering links between botanical movements and personal memory, which deepened her practice’s engagement with history, ecology, and emotional resonance, Hoàng combined methods from her earlier research on tree resonance and perception with archival investigations into Amsterdam’s urban and botanical history.

Laure Winants is a researcher and visual artist whose practice merges science, art, and technology. Living between Paris and Brussels, her work translates scientific data into image, raising awareness of climate change in a move away from dominant panic-inducing narratives. Instead, by visualising the invisible factors driving these changes, Winants uses art to explore future scenarios based on available scientific data, enabling the circulation of this knowledge outside specialized circles. Winants’ new project, “Fossils of the Future,” examines human interconnectedness with the ocean, working to create a Pantone scale that reveals ocean acidification. During her time at FUTURES Hub, she spent two weeks in Brittany working in the field which, in this case, was the bottom of the ocean. Upon her return, she shared her research at the open studio through an interactive installation responding to the surrounding environment. As she states, “I think this is very important to establish a relationship between the work and the space.”

For Bobby Yu Shuk Pui, her time in residence served as a preparation for her newly produced short movie “Curses: Final Girls,” which was just recently on view at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. As a visual artist and filmmaker, she connected with the public in Amsterdam to collect their nightmares and merge them with her own to feed the script of her short movie. Indeed, her practice weaves personal trauma together with collective, unarticulated anxieties simmering beneath the surface of any society, whether in Hong Kong, Norway, or the Netherlands. These psychological tensions materialize as curses or mythic beings that return to haunt the present. In her work, they re-emerge through pop-cultural icons and narratives, drawing on influences such as K-pop, anime, and horror cinema.

Zurich-based duo UNSTATED’s residency at the FUTURES Hub offered rare time away from commercial work to focus on self-initiated research. For five weeks, they developed “From Nowhere,” a project exploring how digital automation reshapes seeing and mapping. Supported by ample space, warm hospitality, and Amsterdam’s atmosphere, they investigated virtual landscapes driven by autonomous agents, merging local traces with algorithmic vision to question perception in non-physical spaces. “The city of Amsterdam played a fundamental role within the ‘Nowhere’ described above. It was among its streets that we made our autonomous agent navigate, leading it to travel between satellite images and virtual maps. In this sense, the traces of space recorded by our algorithmic vision are undoubtedly ‘local,’ because they always belong to a scene that took place in a specific moment and place in Amsterdam”, they mention.

Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist Olena Morozova describes her residency experience as an “important step” for her practice, allowing her to strengthen the research aspect of her work while receiving professional support. Building on her project “The Roots Are Breathing,” Morozova curated an installation that, rather than following linear storytelling, layered different mediums and materials to create an immersive experience for the viewer. Fostering a meditative atmosphere, she displayed a selection of found natural objects, clay sculptures, and drawings, while also coordinating her own live performance. Rooted in Morozova’s connection with nature and childhood memories, the work explores feelings of loss, fragility, and precariousness. The roots of trees, breathing, become a metaphor for our personal roots and for the importance of keeping them alive as well, especially against the backdrop of war and unrest.

For Michal Sita and Anna Pilawska-Sita, the residency could not have come at a better time. The couple had just gotten back from Jeju in Korea, where, since 2024, they had been developing work exploring how infrastructural interventions influence the island’s natural landscape. The level of exchange between artists, researchers, and institutions fostered by the residency reflects the interdisciplinary gist of Michal and Anna’s collaboration; his practice rooted in anthropology, hers in architecture. “Now, we’re at a stage that requires time and space” explained Michal at the start of the residency. During their time in Amsterdam, they focused on revisiting the materials they had gathered on golf tourism and its impact on Jeju’s local territory. The couple concluded their stay with a workshop in which, through an interactive exercise in spatial thinking, they bent the space to the rules of golf, inviting participants to move through the room accordingly.

Ugo Woatzi, currently in residency and opening up their studio on December 10, views the opportunity as a moment of pause and transformation, offering distance from routine and immersion in new contexts. Drawn back to the Netherlands after studying at the Jan van Eyck Academie, they see the FUTURES Hub as a place to reconnect and gain new energy. They are expanding their research on speculative mythologies and a river deity, developing writing and artworks that merge photography, drawing, and text. “I value the unexpected encounters and opportunities that often arise during residencies. For me, impact doesn’t only come from structured meetings, but also from chance conversations, shared moments, and the new directions they can open.”

The FUTURES Amsterdam Residency illustrates how mobility and research-led practice are reshaping the cultural landscape. Mobility becomes a creative method, and residencies operate as commons: spaces of care, exchange, and transformation.