Art Aia – Creatives / In / Residence collaborates with Artist-Led Open Collective Uronto Artist Community affiliated with Art Initiative Bangladesh-AIB. Its founder Giovanni Morassutti has been part of the selection board along with independent curator Sadya Mizan and he has co-curated the 8th and 9th Episode of the Uronto Residential Art Exchange Program. “It was a long journey by bus and when we reached the destination, it was dark all around. She came with a torch with two other young men after a while to show us the way to a small house located next to a huge pond which is going to be our residence for the next two weeks. We are here to trace the history of an unknown palace of Naogaon District. I had goose bumps in that winter evening, not because of the mist all around but owing to the thrill that was in store for us.” This is how one of the participants from the residency program shared the experience of going to a remote area with a view to exploring a 200-year-old palace (Rajbari).
URONTO Artist Community has been doing the job of conserving age-old heritage for a long time. They reconnect with the lost memories of forgotten places through inter-disciplinary contemporary artistic interventions. They create opportunities to share the joy of connecting to cultural histories through empowering current generations with knowledge. The ‘URONTO Residential Art Exchange Program’ is one of the major yearly initiatives they have been organizing since 2012.
For many people heritage conservation is a western approach that is limited to collecting and showcasing age-old materials in a museum. But this residency program is a unique idea for heritage conservation that came from a very young girl. While asked about the journey Sadya Mizan, the founder and director of URONTO Artists Community, said, “I visited my grandparents’ residence located in the Baul capital Kushtia for the first time when I was a student. Standing inside the house I visualized everything that I have heard during my childhood. All of a sudden I realized how art can be a strong tool for alternative conservation.” Her desire to do something noble brought in URONTO, an art exchange program that collaborates with researchers, activists, painters, sculptors, installation artists, visual artists, performance artists, photographers, musicians, sound artists, craftsmen, textile designers, writers and historians or simply anyone who connects to old architectures and can showcase their time spent there in a creative way. URONTO’s activities not only provide much-needed opportunities for Bangladeshi artists to expand their arena and collaborate with international artists, but through each residency program they create a body of alternative documentation about the history of the selected sites.
The 8th and 9th episode of the residency program was held recently at Dubolhati Rajbari located in Naogaon. This year the episodes were co-curated by Sadya Mizan and Giovanni Morassutti (Germany). Around 30 multidisciplinary artists came from 10 different countries to explore this little-known zaminder bari. The artists had their own medium to form ideas about the buildings by working on the history, differences between past and present state and other aesthetical views.
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ART AIA - CREATIVES IN RESIDENCE 
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