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 time
Have a studio space
You need to focus on producing a new work or editing an ongoing project
Connect with other artists
You need to expand your network and share new ideas
Experiment
You need some dedicated time to find a new creative path
Deepen your interests
You want to explore more about nature, history, community sustainability, future, and much more
Taste a bit of Italy
You wish to have fresh food, experience the local culture and the different pace of a rural village
Why 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!
Stefano Conti
Visual Artist and Photographer, Sweden
In Sardinia I got to experience life with another phase, slower and more laid back. This helped my mental health and my focus on the project. I also had the chance to get to know the local community that made the whole experience priceless.
Sean Dahlman
Video Maker and Composer, USA
Nocefresca was truly incredible. I created many beautiful friendships and memories. The activities helped me develop my art and, with little distractions and stunning landscapes, I had consistent focus, which is rare in the city I live in.
Momo
Fashion Designer, USA
Nocefresca was a life changing experience. It allowed me to create in gorgeous studios and to plan my days around an inspiring schedule. It introduced me to lifelong friends and it gave me space to grow and learn within a beautiful island.
News
2024-03-15
March/April Artists in Residence
Discover our artists in residence in March-April 2024
With the arrival of spring, we kick off our fourth year of artistic residencies in Milis. The first group of artists has arrived, ready to engage in a residency that extends throughout the months of March and April, constituting the first stage of our programme "The Water Journey": a series of activities and meetings will lead them to discover Sardinia and the area around Milis, following the thematic thread of water. See this link for a more detailed description of this year's theme.
Sub-theme of this month: Mitza, the source. How does an artistic project originate? What are the sources of inspiration for our residents? Before allowing you to enter their studios on April 9th, we'll tell you a bit more about them.
Rose Brookfield has spent the last two years working her way through different parts of the food and farming industry in the UK, Europe and beyond. She founded the podcast, Farming for the Future, which aims to act as career advice for people who might be interested in entering the farming industry but don’t know where to start. She is currently undertaking a MST in creative writing at Oxford University. Her work aims to explore how the written word can help us reconnect our human selves to our animal selves.
More info on her instagram
Originally from the North of France, Fabrice discovered his interest for animation as a child watching Norman Mac Laren's films at the local cinema. Since he studied at Duperré Applied Arts School in 1986, he has lived and worked in Paris. In 1990 he embarked upon a four year collaboration with the directing duo Kuntzel and Deygas. He has worked on many commercials and music videos.
During this time, he started to develop his own ideas and a distinctive directing style. He completed his debut film "Cycle Logical" in 2002, which was selected/awarded in many festivals and events such as Annecy, Mattita, Wissenbourg, Sao Paulo, Auch, Krakow ; and in 2007, he directed his second short film "The Butter Dilemma". Subsequently he directed several children's TV series director, including "Zoe Kezako" - which won the "Certificate of Excellence" in Chicago 2004, the animation prize at the Paris Senate and a nomination for an i-Emmy award 2006 and was distributed in many countries around the world, and « International Hareport », « Mily Miss questions », and recently Presto ! for M6 in France.
As a director, Fabrice demonstrates a unique story telling and directing style, combining imaginative visual humour with strong characterisation and a fresh graphic look. He brings his expertise to every aspect of the production and works very closely with his team, from scriptwriting to storyboarding, animation and sound. Fabrice always carries a sketchbook. He loves drawing, he constantly sketches new ideas and continues to make short films, documentaries and music videos in his spare time.
More info at his website
Hanna Ilczyszyn is a Polish visual artist based in Brussels, Belgium. She works in mediums such as: painting, drawing, installations, ceramic.
She was an MFA student at Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Gent, Belgium, and previously studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. She has been exhibiting her work at many solo and group shows in Europe, Asia and USA, and has been selling her work to collectors around the world. Her evocative paintings are capturing the innocence and uncertainties of childhood.
More info at her website
Joy Kloman was a tenured associate professor at University of Mississippi, who supervised graduate and undergraduate painting programs and taught drawing in London. She was the recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist State Grant. She had work displayed in The Drawing Center Viewing Program & Slide Registry, NY. Kloman attended an artist residency in Hungary. Her art is in many private and public collections including, Balatonfüred City Hall, Ringling Museum of Art, Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Pensacola Museum of Art, and Meridian Museum of Art.
More info at her website
Lisa Martin is an award-winning Italian-Australian journalist. For the past three years, Lisa was a Southeast Asia Correspondent with Agence France-Presse (AFP) based in Bangkok. In 2023 she served as President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. Lisa is a four-time finalist in Australia’s Walkley Awards—the top prize for journalism excellence. Previously, she worked for The Guardian in Melbourne and was based in the Canberra Press Gallery at the Australian Federal Parliament for eight years with the Australian Associated Press (AAP). Her overseas assignments included a military embed with the Royal Australian Air Force in the Middle East and covering prime ministerial trips including to Washington DC and international leaders summits. In late 2023 she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark for love. She is working on her debut novel "The Last Letter Writer in Bangkok".
More info at her website
Born in Sardinia in 1988, he holds a Master’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Milan, he is a multidisciplinary producer of media outputs, a musician and a sound designer. Primarily a composer and musician, he developes soundscapes. His audio creation process favors the capture of environmental sounds, both artificial and natural, through the practice of audio sampling and their subsequent remodeling, from which he make loops, synthesizers, and rhythmic sections that he use to develop new languages that engage in a collaborative dialogue with his work subjects. Over the years, he has had the pleasure of collaborating with several artists and realities, including Tonino Casula, Caterina Erica Shanta, Fabio Piccioni, Prometheus Lab, Fotoromanzo Italiano, Padiglione Tavolara, My Art Guides, Dolomiti Contemporanee and Progettoborca. Within the latter, he launched the “Studio Campione” project in 2020, where he engages in multidisciplinary work, including microscopic photography, vegetal carbonization, and organic pigment production.
On a more general level, his work involves a strong theoretical framework aimed at achieving a re-application of meaning to the concepts involved in the study of my subjects of investigation. This leads him to uncover specific narrative structures that envelop them, in an attempt to approach their essence and present them in new narrative forms. His operational focus is on technological re-domestication, the repositioning of techniques into an exclusively instrumental role in the production horizon, in order to counteract their typical leading role of the modern era. He thinks this is possible through their re-conversion: by changing the intended use of their tools, conceiving a different product output from what they were originally designed and developed for, shifting the target users, and repurposing obsolete tools and forms of traditional techniques that have fallen into the oblivion of decommissioning and disuse.
More info at his website
Mark van Wageningen is the founder of Novo Typo, a (typo)graphic research- and designstudio and font foundry based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Mark van Wageningen approach to design is deeply rooted in a love for craftsmanship and an investigative approach to design, production-techniques, tools, materials and their context. The output of the studio can be situated on the cutting edge between design, applied arts and craftsmanship. Mark van Wageningen lectures and presents the work of Novo Typo at a number of international design conferences and festivals such as Dutch Design Week and Milan Design Week. Before the books Offgrid and Analog Aesthetics were published, Mark van Wageningen wrote and designed Typewood, Novo Typo Color Book and Type and Color which received several international design awards. His work is translated in English, German and Chinese. During his residency at Nocefresca Mark van Wageningen / Novo Typo present its return to the three fundamental elements of analogue graphic design: letters, ink and paper. The Novo Typo On Site project which will be executed at Milis, Sardinia is a reflection on how to destandardize and autonomize graphic design in order to be truly self-sufficient.
More info at his website
Rose Brookfield - Writer (UK)
Fabrice Fouquet - Animation Film Maker (France)
Hanna Ilczyszyn - Visual Artist (Poland / Belgium)
Joy Kloman - Painter and Art Teacher (USA)
Lisa Martin - Journalist and Writer (Australia / Denmark)
Fabio Talloru - Multimedia and Sound Artist (Italy)
Mark van Wageningen - Graphic and Type Designer (Netherlands)
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.
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?
