Image: Fundaziun NAIRS / Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst, Scuol
In October, the Fundaziun Nairs artists-in-residence program welcomes the collective Arina Frölich, Kymbali Williams and Martha Mutapay. Former residents Asi Föcker, Bettina Gugger, Janet Müller and Beatrice Dörig return for two-week residencies. Tim Ross joins for a short residency, while Alessandro Giannelli, Alizé Rose-May, Bertilla Valentina Spinas and Leo Shearmur continue working at Nairs.
Central to Kymbali Williams’s work are psychogeographic methods that treat walking and stillness as forms of research into grief and embodied memory. Through intentional wandering and extended periods of immobility in chosen locations, she investigates how landscape and weather activate mourning, memory and connections to absent presences. Her performative audio walks guide participants through urban and rural landscapes via spoken word and multi-genre soundscapes, operating as a form of singing people through place.
At Nairs, Williams will dedicate time to working with the surrounding mountain landscape as a reflector and amplifier for her singing and physical practice. She will document her artistic practice to create a mini archive of her creative findings, while researching and practising care and friendship through ritual with Arina Frölich and Martha Mutapay.
Martha Mutapay is a dancer, performer and theatre-maker working at the intersection of choreography, craft and pedagogy. Her practice blends physical theatre, movement and textile processes to explore care, co-existence and the social politics of bodies in relation.
Martha Mutapay, Arina Frölich and Kymbali Williams are all part of the Performing Rage Collective.
