With the ADKDW Residency, the Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) is dedicated to making visible the potential of an intercultural, urban society by fostering critical engagement with issues such as migration, globalization, identity, and diversity, and by strengthening the diversity of participating voices in current discourses.
Beginning in July 2023, ADKDW welcomes Giscard Bouchotte and Yvan Hervé Butera a.k.a. BuTeRa as Artists-in-Residence in Cologne.
Giscard Bouchotte, exhibition curator, critic, and social entrepreneur from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, curated the first pavilion of the Republic of Haiti at the Biennale di Venezia in 2011. His recent projects include Périféériques, exploring new artistic and social practices in peri-urban spaces (Benin, Senegal, Haiti). With Nuit blanche in Port-au-Prince, he called on artists to participate in urban projects, and as a director and producer he participated in several films. In 2022, Bouchotte participated in the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The ADKDW Art and Research Fellowship now invites Giscard Bouchotte to get to know Cologne and its art and creative scene intensively and to find new impulses for his own work.
BuTeRa (he/they), born in Rwanda, founded the Kaze Film Festival, the first queer film festival in his home country. In 2022, BuTeRa also co-organized the first Kigali Pride celebration. As part of the Participatory Residency Program, BuTeRa will work with participatory art forms and develop an interactive program for the local scenes and communities in Cologne. With a theater play and an audio installation in the ADKDW studio, the program will particularly address multiple-marginalized individuals and groups who are excluded from majority-society discourses, based on their origin, religion, class, and/or sexual orientation, for example. The goal of the program is to strengthen the participation of marginalized groups in society and to support the participants in giving artistic expression to the reality of their lives: "My ADKDW Residency will be a tapestry of diversity, inclusion, strength, and resilience, telling the stories of LGBTQIA+ individuals who have dared to be themselves against all odds, that will allow the LGBTQIA+ Community to reclaim the Queer narratives, Queer spaces, and creates the possibility of embracing the full spectrum of love and identity.", says BuTeRa.
