Inner River: A Month-Long Art Residency for Creative Wayfinding 🌊🎨
Looking for creative souls to join our month-long art residency in the Life Itself conscious co-living Hub in Bergerac, France! (July 7th-August 4th, 2025). Apply by May 30th.
In a world of socio-ecological crises, does art even matter? Should I be doing something “more useful” with my time? How would I know if my art is valuable?
With sincerity and playfulness alike, we’ll pack questions like these into our bags and meet in a small French town with red tile roofs and quiet sunsets. We’ll spend a month living, exploring, and creating together in a charming, multi-storey house on the banks of the Dordogne river.
Inner River is a month-long container of contemplation, community, and creativity for 10-12 artists to dive into an individual and shared journey of discovering and creating “our voice(s)”. An exploration of ancestry – where we come from through to what kinds of ancestors we want to become – will form the ground of this inquiry.
Will you join us?
Key Information
What: Month-long residency combining creative practices, contemplative practices, and conscious community living practices
Where: Life Itself Hub in Bergerac, south-west France (~1.5h from Bordeaux)
When: July 7th - August 4th, 2025
Who: Artists of any medium and experience level, who are curious to craft and encounter their creative selves. If you’re not sure whether you identify as an “artist” but feel connected with your creative spark, you’re welcome too.
Cost: €400-750 for room + €350 for food & consumables + €400-800 sliding scale contribution towards organising, hosting, and facilitation.
Application process: 1) Application form 2) Call with a member of the Hosting Team. Applications close on 30th May. N.B. Places and rooms are being filled on a rolling basis, so please apply as soon as you can.
More about the residency
What are we exploring?
The invitation is to be in a month-long conversation with ourselves, each other, and the wider world. To step out of our day-to-day routines – and try on new and mystical storytelling of our lives as artists and citizens.
Our inquiry into our creative selves will take place in the realms of a thematic exploration of ancestry…
Where do we come from, and what shaped us into who we are? What are the gifts and debts of our inheritance? Who are our ancestors, and what kinds of ancestors do we want to become?
We hope this time can be a gift to ourselves where we invite each other to…
Step out of our usual routines and see ourselves reflected through the fresh mirrors of a new place and community
Follow the breadcrumbs of our creative histories, wishes, and joys, to see how we’ve become who we are today
Think of ourselves and our art as ingredients which shape our world, however big or small our scope
Water each other’s creative growth by generously sharing genuine curiosity and honest reflection
Reimagine artists not just as decorators and entertainers, but as essential researchers and guides asking how we want to steer the world
Week-by-week flow
We’ll spend the first 3 weeks in open exploration and inquiry into our stories of ourselves and of our world. Each week will include a lightly guided structure with a shared prompt and creative activities in the evening, with lots of room for all residents to co-create the container with our own offerings, as we feel called.
Week 1, Origin — We’ll start by taking a look at where we come from, and what has shaped us into who we are, as artists and people. Who are our ancestors? What are the gifts and debts of our inheritance?
Week 2, Journey — From there, we’ll look to the current moment in our story. Who’s here today? Who have we become, and who are we becoming? Where do we belong, and what are we guided by?
Week 3, Prophecy — Lastly, we’ll turn our gaze to the future. What is the story we’re writing? What is our gift to the world? What kinds of ancestors do we want to become?
Week 4, Offering — And in the last week, we will switch gears to a focused week of making!
Daily flow
Practically, we start and end each day with communal practices, with ample time for open exploration in between. A sample day may look like:
7:30-8:30am Morning practice
8:30-9am Breakfast
9-10am Collective care (cooking, cleaning, gardening, etc.)
Open studio time
1-2pm Informal/self-service lunch
Open time
6:30-7:30pm Family dinner
8-9:30pm Gather for creative activities (organized activities 2-3 evenings each week, and open time on other days)
On Sundays, we’ll organize excursions to the Mindfulness day at Plum Village, late Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful Zen Buddhist monastery nearby.
Practices
In our time together, we’ll engage in a range of creative, conscious co-living, and contemplative practices. Some of these will be offered by the hosting team, and some will be initiated by residents.
Some examples are:
Creative practices: creative jams, reflections, and games; storytelling; resonance singing; 5Rhythms dance…
Conscious Co-living practices: cleaning and cooking together; collective decision-making; sharing circles; community meetings; connection and nervous system regulation activities…
Contemplative practices: meditation; qigong; yoga; Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy); silent time…
A core part of the residency will also be plenty of time for working on our art and simply enjoying time alone or together.
About the Hosting Team
Jenny Lim
Jenny is a former strategy consultant turned artist and community organizer based in San Francisco. She is engaged in an ongoing investigation into how we might “do life together” — a guiding question rooted in her Korean and Christian heritage, and nurtured by her experiences in intentional communities around the world. This inquiry has led her to study permaculture and ritual design, support the formation of community houses, and help cultivate a shared rhythm within her closest community through annual retreats and Sunday reflection gatherings. Most recently, her focus has been on hosting DIY art residencies as incubating spaces for herself and other artists-in-the-making. Jenny is a painter, muralist, and intuitive cook who delights in every opportunity to create a shared table.
Catherine Tran
Catherine is a researcher and community facilitator at Life Itself. She has hosted residencies and gatherings for inner-led change at the Bergerac Hub, as well as in Germany and the UK. An avid reader as a child, a fascination with language and the power of words led her to study English Literature at the University of Cambridge before going on to study an Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Cultural Narratives. Her creative inspirations include Ocean Vuong, David Whyte, and Theatre of the Oppressed; contemplative inspirations include Tara Brach, Systemic Constellations, and Soulcraft; and socio-ecological change inspirations include the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Joanna Macy and the Work that Reconnects, and Donna Haraway.
Alexia Netcu
Originally from Romania, Alexia has lived in 5 countries and became acutely aware of the necessity to orient towards more awake and regenerative ways of being during her studies in Culture and Politics and her time helping run the Life Itself Bergerac Hub in Fall-Winter 2023-4. Following a period focused on climate work and coming to terms with the worrisome realities at hand, she is currently reconnecting with her childhood passion for painting and exploring how art can help heal the fragmented parts of ourselves and the world.
About the Life Itself Bergerac Hub
The Life Itself Bergerac Praxis Hub is a conscious co-living space for people to gather and experiment with the embodied presence and practical action needed to respond wisely and cultivate radical social change in a time of metacrisis.
At the Bergerac Praxis Hub, the experimental ground for individual and collective growth, creativity, and spiritual connection is nurtured by a light frame of shared practices, including meditating, cooking, and cleaning together. You could think of it as a kind of “secular monastery”: while not adhering to a particular religion or spiritual tradition, grounded mindfulness is cultivated through practice and structure as a means of exploring new ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the wider world.
Life Itself is a collective of people and projects dedicated to rigorous inquiry and action for an awakening society and a radically wiser, weller world.
About Bergerac
Bergerac is a small town in Southwest France, known for its old town’s half-timbered buildings and the castles that dot the surrounding countryside. It has beautiful architecture, and great wine from nearby vineyards. Bergerac old town centre is 10 minutes’ walk from the Hub. The Dordogne River runs a few steps in front of the hub, and July is a lovely time to go for a swim or for long riverside walks. There is a train station 20 minutes’ walk from the Hub with regular trains to Bordeaux (from which run regular trains to Paris), a twice-weekly farmers’ market, and a dozen boulangeries.
Bergerac has most things we need, including an art supply store and a Recyclerie (second hand shop). It’s a beautifully peaceful place that leaves plenty of room for us to listen to ourselves and the world around. Though small, Bergerac can also be lively – there are bars, restaurants, and cafés in town, as well as concerts, open mic nights and dance nights. Bastille Day celebrations will also be taking place the week of 14th July.
FAQs
What do you mean by “artist”? Do I have to be good at art to come?
Come and explore these questions with us ;) What does it mean to be an artist? What is “good” art? That aside — in short, no, you don’t have to be “good” at art to come. We ask that you have an existing relationship with art and creativity whatever that looks like to you, and that you feel ready to get your hands dirty in a month-long container in which there will be a lot of open, unstructured time for working on your art, and committed to contributing a final piece (or series of pieces) to our shared exhibition at the end of the residency. We recommend that you know already which medium/media you would like to work with before the start of the residency.
What is a “residency”?
A residency is a space in which practices, artistic or otherwise, can be nourished through collective inquiry, shared structure, and time for individual work. While conducive to introspection and inner work, it is not a retreat from the world, nor a fully facilitated personal development or trauma healing space with e.g. professional therapists.
Get in touch
For any other questions, please send us an email at innerriver.art@gmail.com. We’ll be delighted to chat.
