Your rural artist's studio
in the heart of the Mediterranean.
Nocefresca is a residency that brings together artists, designers, writers and creative nomads from around the world. Our objective is for artists to focus on their projects while experiencing the inspiring environment of Sardinia island, Italy, rich in nature, history and culture. You will love it if you want to...
Have a detox period
You live in a congested city and need some quiet timeHave a studio space
You need to focus on producing a new work or editing an ongoing projectConnect with other artists
You need to expand your network and share new ideasExperiment
You need some dedicated time to find a new creative pathDeepen your interests
You want to explore more about nature, history, community sustainability, future, and much moreTaste a bit of Italy
You wish to have fresh food, experience the local culture and the different pace of a rural villageWhy Sardinia?
Living in a rural village of Sardinia, close to local communities and far from tourists and chaotic cities, treats you with moments of authentic simplicity to connect with the most elementary life values.As a resident artist, you will gain daily doses of inspiration discovering a landscape of wide-open spaces, scents and sounds of nature. The territory offers clues and evidence that tell the story of a remote past and prehistoric societies. You will find secular trees, rare botanical species, rocks and caves marked by the most ancient geological eras and shaped by the wind and the sea. Enigmatic archaeological findings and megalithic architecture are disseminated throughout the island and constitute a priceless cultural heritage. Sardinia also hosts one of the five Blue Zones in the world where people live significantly longer than average, thanks to their wellbeing lifestyle.
Read about the residency location
For Whom
Nocefresca is perfect for (but not limited to):
Visual artists
Designers
Writers
Photographers
Composers
Mixed-Media
artists
artists
Fashion
designers
designers
Videomakers
Architects
Illustrators
Social media
artists
artists
Community
artists
artists
An incubator for artists, designers and creative professionals
As a Nocefresca resident, you will be encouraged to self-direct your research with curatorial assistance, initiate new projects and explore original ways of working. Together with you, there will be other artists constituting a vibrant small community of different ages and geographical origins.
In this way, artists will have access to the experiences and activities that best support their artistic growth. With Nocefresca, participants can find professional support for the development of their projects regardless of the outcome, even in the delicate initial phase when any result is still uncertain.
Find out more
In this way, artists will have access to the experiences and activities that best support their artistic growth. With Nocefresca, participants can find professional support for the development of their projects regardless of the outcome, even in the delicate initial phase when any result is still uncertain.
What the artists say
Read the reviews from our past residents and get to know how their experience was!News
2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #24 Jack Kirne
Urban Schemes versus Rural Escapes
Jack Kirne is a writer and unionist based in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in various publications including Necessary Fiction, the Meanjin blog, Subbed In and the anthologies Growing up Queer in Australia and New Australian Fiction (KYD).
You are a writer and you also work as a unionist. How does your political activism inform and influence your art practice, if it does?
That's a broad question. I think often: doing union work, you meet so many people. So you're always being exposed to sort of different characters and different ways of seeing a problem, which is really productive, I guess, when you're writing, because you've got this bank that 's always being refilled. I think I also get to see people, I guess, at their worst a lot of the time. When they call the union, it's not because they're in a good place. Often they're really having a hard time. So I think I find a lot of very intimate stories with people that, again, provide this kind of material of the world in a way that's very different to my regular life, where I think people are usually trying to be quite optimistic and have fun. I think also those different kind of political perspectives that come with people talking about politics has forced me to kind of nuance my view of the world. And invariably, not consciously, but invariably that ends up influencing how you write and what you think.
What do you think are the most challenging aspects to be a writer nowadays?
I think perhaps the most challenging thing is, in Australia, and I'm sure abroad, the sort of death of small presses. I think there are less and less places for people to get published. What does get published is increasingly conservative or playing to a particular market. And so I think the project of writing, for me anyway, is about trying to sort of think about your community of people who are making art around you. So it's those writers that you like and working with them and sharing work with them. And that is being a different way of kind of making writing that isn't about the book or, you know, finding a wide readership. It's about finding people who care about this craft that you're doing. Remember reading an interview a few years ago that was talking about the novel as going the way of the easel painting. And I think there's some truth to that . But when your art form becomes obscure, well, then it goes from being this thing that is kind of lauded and celebrated and becomes something that's quite intimate. So that's a challenge, but it's also something I find humbling and moving about that.
Even if Sardinia is not the location of the novel you wrote during your stay, what elements of the island do you think had an impact on this novel?
Oh, well, actually, the final sequence of the book will take place in Sardinia, which was not something I sort of expected. So the escape into goat life will take place in Sardinia. It sort of in a funny way that only became clear once I was here.
Part of the reason why I wanted to do this residency was because I'd sort of joked about this goat life thing for years and being somewhere remote and doing that was one of the things I found really appealing. And once I got here, I mean, I knew that that fantasy was silly. But being here has been on one hand totally magical and very inspiring to see how community works. But also, then you speak to people and they'll say the same things about wanting to escape to the big city, you know, and how, you know, they can 't find a job or they feel like they're at a lost end. And they have this dream of escape into the city.
So for me, that sort of produced like what I can imagine is kind of the full circle of the novel, this dream to escape into the countryside and then realising that the escape in the countryside is just to find another place where people want to escape to the city.
Is the rest of the novel set in Australia?
Yes. In a big city. So I mean, the middle of the book is just the characters pulling off a bunch of like schemes to steal a bunch of money to then elope into this house in Sardinia.
Okay. Okay. Okay. We are curious. Very, very curious .
Yeah. I mean, here has been so inspiring. Like, there's just so much. I mean, I think also because the community has been so welcoming. But you just walk into places and people tell you all kinds of really odd stories about this place. And so when you start to put them together, what you build, I mean, it's not Millis. It's sort of like a mythologised Millis that sort of collapses the wider populace into this like imagined island. But it's all there and it's just so exciting. So I actually felt it was that night of the choir performance and we ended up with a big community dinner. I felt that like that was the sort of end of the novel in the sense that this is the most, it represents the dream of kind of this community and everyone coming together. And yet there are all these kind of sinister elements kind of working in the background.
Did it also shape like the way the characters move or interact or behave? Like seeing all this?
Not really. I think, as I said, I had a very clear idea of sort of what they wanted. I think it just sort of clarified what I was trying to do, which was good. Yes, cool.
More info about Jack on his website.
2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #23 Nils Olsson
Editoriality as a collective process
Nils Olsson is a writer, editor and senior lecturer, primarily active at the departments of Literary Composition and Comparative Literature, University of Gothenburg . His research has probed aesthetics and modernism in general, as well as Gertrude Stein’s writing in particular. His teaching is mainly focused on editorial practice and creative writing, with special attention to collective processes and extended notions of publication. His latest book (“r.”, 2022) is an experimental treatise on “editoriality”, which explores the limits and possibilities of the physical book through collaboration, chance, algorithmic writing, and alternative modes of distribution.
Your current research is focused on making connections between the concepts of publication, community and food , food sharing. How did you arrive to this step of the research?
The act of making something public is always a collective endeavor. So, it all goes together. Even if you take someone who’s a self-published author, like the woman who runs the bar in Milis, Irene Lai; well, even in that case, someone else is running the print shop, someone else made the paper, etc. So, from a material standpoint, publication is always a collective effort. And of course, we can talk about where you find the formats, the inspiration, the genres you are writing in, and so on.
There’s always a collective kind of machine involved.
The food thing is basically just me being into food and wanting to find a way to combine interests so I can do more fun stuff. That’s like the honest answer. But then again, food, the meal, is something that has to do with so many things related to sharing, collectivity and the communal, but also in a broader sense with regards to distribution and cultivating and collecting things, putting them together, sending them out – basically editorial practices.
So, I haven’t really arrived anywhere. I’m just trying to think about in what ways food is related to my work on editoriality. Thanks to this residency I have been able to take a few steps by being invited to work with the Food for Thoughts project.
That was my second question: you were one of the artists involved in the second episode of Food for Thoughts. What did this experience give to your art practice?
It provided a situation where I together with someone else – or with several other people actually – could try to combine thinking about editoriality with cooking, with sharing food, sharing and presenting a meal. It was an opportunity to conduct an experiment, to try things out –trying out a concrete format for working with food in an aesthetic and critical situation dealing with editing and making a publication.
Personally, I prefer to work with what is handed to me. I prefer to react to situations or surroundings. Which of course is because I’m a critic and a scholar first and foremost. I need something to work with or react to.
And in this case, there already was a format, there was a situation, there were collaborators, so that suited me very well. In contrast to, let’s say, sitting down and just from nothing planning out something that’s going to invent stuff from nothing. I don’t think I can do that. Actually, no one really does that, and I don’t think that’s what the world really needs.
So many words, ideas and things are and have been produced and uttered that it’s more a question of what to do with them. How do we take care of the stuff that is already here? To take care of, understand, challenge, get rid of, recycle … The world is there. It’s not to be invented anew in that sense.
Your work is focused on the concept of editing and publication . What do you think about the future of the physical book in the digital era?
Channeling media thinkers Marshall McLuhan Friedrich Kittler, and their respective notions about how the history of technology works, we become aware of a medium as such first when it is replaced by a new medium. Fifty years ago, we didn't really think about the book as a machine. The codex was something totally natural, a dominating technique for holding knowledge or information together.
The digitalization, of basically everything, made us become more aware of the printed book as a kind of mechanism, as a kind of machine, as well as a bearer of different kind of values. When you write a literary review, of a novel for instance, you don’t begin with: “This is a 500-gram object, built up of different leaves of pulp, which you’re supposed to open and operate with your hands, read it from, left to right (in the Western world), etc…”
I’m have no clue what the future of the physical book is, but my point is that the fact that it has been partially replaced by screen-based media and audio books has at the same time made us more aware of the book as an object. It certainly hasn’t made us forget about it.
Vinyl records sales have increased a lot during the last 20 years. And of course, the market has been driven partially by hipster dudes with lots of facial hair who treasure their hi-fi equipment. Sure, it’s a cultural identity kind of thing; a material culture thing. And one could perhaps see some similarities in how our relationship with books has developed, at least partially, for some of us.
The limited editions, the small networks of small presses making precious objects – a materiality reflecting the preciousness of poetic (or even intellectual) discourse. But then again, today more physical books are printed and produced than ever. It doesn’t seem to decrease. So, I think the question of the physical book is one thing, and then another question would be: what’s the future of literature or poetry?And in what ways is literature as we have known it connected to, and will or won’t continue to be connected to, the physical book? It won’t be in the same way. I don't think so. And I don’t think it should! Literature is about inscription, and there are many practices of, and surfaces for, inscription. The book is actually a pretty recent one. Printing isn’t that old, relatively. And it has been superseded by other techniques, as in digital formats. So, literature, I’d say, is something that potentially takes place when an inscription is made. Even just saying a word out loud is kind of an inscription into the ether, the air. It’s certainly not very archivable, it goes away immediately, and thereby becomes all the more precious, perhaps. While carving letters in a rock has totally different longevity. They are just different kinds of inscription surfaces, both potentially serving as vehicles for literary practice. I don’t know what the future is for the book, but neither the book nor literature is going away, and perhaps neither of them are dependent on each other.
More info about Nils on this website https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/nilsolsson
OPEN CALL 2024
DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 15TH 2023
We are excited to announce the open call for our artist residency program 2024 edition!
Nocefresca will bring you to Milis (Sardinia island, Italy), a charming rural village that nurtures a deep connection with nature. The village is surrounded by citrus groves, nestled just below the Montiferru mountain range and a 19km drive from the stunning beaches of Sardinia’s west coast.
Are you seeking the time and space to focus on your projects and connect with fellow artists in a Mediterranean setting?
We are excited to announce the open call for our artist residency program 2024 edition!
Nocefresca will bring you to Milis (Sardinia island, Italy), a charming rural village that nurtures a deep connection with nature. The village is surrounded by citrus groves, nestled just below the Montiferru mountain range and a 19km drive from the stunning beaches of Sardinia’s west coast.
Are you seeking the time and space to focus on your projects and connect with fellow artists in a Mediterranean setting?