Arts Connection Foundation and Escolarte have signed an agreement under which the foundation funds Escolarte’s first Art-Pedagogical Residency, in Maracaibo, Zulia state, Venezuela. The programme will bring in one or two local artist-educators to develop an educational process with high school students in one or two school communities, with priority given to public schools.
The distinction matters, and it defines the whole programme: this is not an artistic production residency. The resident does not arrive to make their own work, or to direct a collective piece. They arrive to accompany. The outcome does not belong to them: it belongs to the young people whose work it is, and to the process that made it possible.
Generate a process
“This is not a residency to produce an artwork. It is a residency to produce a process: a young person looks at their surroundings, finds something they want to say, and dares to say it.”
The work is paid by the hour, in a city and a sector with few stable professional openings. The priority given to public schools answers a concrete gap: they rarely have staff working in visual arts.
The profile the open call seeks is broader than people tend to assume. Candidates do not need to be practicing artists with a body of work, and a portfolio is optional, not required. What is needed is artistic sensibility and the ability to support a creative process, which means artists, educators, architects, designers, and teachers drawn to the intersection of art and education are all eligible. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed.
Annual Exhibition in March
Escolarte, founded and directed by the artist Elsy Zavarce, has spent ten years working on the meeting point between art and education in Zulia. Its annual Salón and its open call Imaginarios del Entorno reach their tenth edition in March 2027, and the residency is designed to lead there: what hangs on those walls will have come out of a process accompanied from inside the classroom rather than curated from outside it.
For Arts Connection Foundation, the agreement extends a line of work that treats art as material communities are built with, rather than something added once everything else has been solved. For Escolarte, it turns a decade of accumulated practice into a paid position.
Applications are open until 30 November 2026 and require a CV, a letter of motivation, and answers to the application form. The selected resident will be announced in January 2027, when the residency begins.