Create and Sirius Arts Centre Artist Residency Award recipient: Rita Marcalo

We are pleased to announce Rita Marcalo as the recipient of the Create and Sirius Arts Centre Artist Residency Award. 

Marcalo is a socially-engaged practitioner whose work resists the idea of art as an object produced by a special kind of person called the ‘artist’. Instead, her work is co-created in dialogue with (and performed by) non-professional artists, and is about issues which matter to them. Although trained in dance/ choreography, Marcalo is concept-led rather than form-led, and her work has taken the form of films, installations, street encounters, walks, and epileptic seizures.

Marcalo says “I have only lived in Ireland for 18 months, and so the residency will offer me the opportunity to, on a personal level, get to know an area of the country that I haven’t visited yet. On a professional level, although I am an experienced socially-engaged choreographer, due to my move to Ireland I am, in many ways, starting from scratch”.
She intends to use the residency to:

Connect with the Irish community of socially-engaged practitioners and gain an understanding of who/what/where/how in the field of socially-engaged practice in Ireland.
Meet with various communities of interest in Cork.
Share her experience in socially-engaged choreography in England and other countries with Irish-based artists: the mistakes as well as the achievements.
Achieve her artistic goals of continuing to develop work in her new country of Ireland.

The residency takes place across both Sirius Arts Centre and The Guesthouse Project in Cork city and provides opportunities for research, exchange, networking, and learning, with additional curatorial advice from Sirius Arts Centre. The residency runs for four weeks, between 2 and 27 September 2020. The residency is funded through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create, and is offered through a partnership between Create and Sirius Arts Centre. It aims to support artists from minority ethnic and migrant backgrounds to develop their collaborative and socially engaged arts practice.

The panel which awarded this residency was chaired by Áine Crowley, Programme Manager Arts and Engagement, and consisted of Owodunni Ola Mustapha, Miguel Amado, and Carolann Courtney. Create staff member Jane O’Rourke observed and took minutes.