Spazio13 launches Urban Bodies, an international artistic residency for four artists, cultural practitioners and researchers interested in exploring the relationship between contemporary migration, urban transformation and the body as a site of memory, negotiation and belonging. The residency will take place in Bari, Italy, in the Libertà neighbourhood, one of the city’s most densely populated districts and one of the areas with the highest concentration of foreign residents. Libertà is a complex urban environment: a place of arrival, return, coexistence and vulnerability, marked by socioeconomic fragilities but also by dense social relations, cultural plurality and emerging practices of urban regeneration. Urban Bodies invites four international practitioners to spend almost two months at Spazio13, from 1 October to 27 November 2026, working with the neighbourhood, its communities and its urban transformations. The residency will combine artistic research, fieldwork, community-based practice, co-creation and public restitution.

Residency Objectives

Urban Bodies aims to create a temporary territory of coexistence between artists, local communities and urban actors. 

The residency has two main objectives. 

1. it will build a relational context between communities of the Libertà neighbourhood through artistic and co-creative practice. Participants will be invited to work with local residents, migrant communities, young people, informal groups and civic actors.

2. it will investigate contemporary migration in relation to the urban and sociological development of the Libertà neighbourhood. The residency will explore how migration, displacement, return, housing pressure, labour precarity and cultural plurality shape the city and the ways in which people inhabit it. The final aim is to produce new urban imaginaries capable of restoring complexity to contemporary mobilities and contributing to a more open, legible and shared city.

Who They Are Looking For

The call is open to international artists, cultural practitioners, designers and researchers with a strong interest in migration, multicultural contexts, urban transformation and community-based practice. We are particularly interested in four complementary profiles:

1. A practitioner working in performance, theatre, dance, movement, sound or embodied practices.

2. A practitioner working in visual arts, photography, video, installation, public art or image-based research.

3. A practitioner working in material design, spatial practice, ecological design, craft, socially engaged design or experimental making.

4. A practitioner working in sociology, urban studies, cultural research, participatory research or socially engaged artistic research.

Applicants may define themselves across more than one field. Hybrid practices are welcome, provided that the applicant can clearly explain their methodology and their capacity to work in co-creation with communities.