[R.A.T.] Residencias Artísticas por Intercambio

Founded in 2014, Mexico

Transdisciplinary research and aesthetic exploration project whose purpose is to facilitate creative practice and foster reflection and critical dialogue among local communities, artists, curators, managers, critics and art researchers from Mexico and abroad. We are a set of autonomous spaces of independent management that is conceived as a meeting point between diverse subjectivities. Our programs operate under a scheme of collaboration based on the logic of exchange and barter, which are articulated in what we have called a SUBJECTIVE ECONOMY MODEL. This allows us to exist outside the hierarchical, bureaucratic and commodified structures of production and diffusion of culture that prevail in today’s society.

[ R.A.T. ] have different programs that can be classified into three basic modalities: residences for researchers and cultural producers, shared workshop spaces, and mechanisms for the propagation and socialization of experiences. For this we have four venues, called PUERTOS:
Puerto Turín, Mexico City
Puerto Mitla, Mexico City
Puerto Acapulco, Acapulco
Puerto Zacatecas, Zacatecas

We aspire to generate conditions of possibility for creative processes to happen, involving interaction and enjoyment and, to that extent, building micro communities. Consequently [R.A.T. ] Does not support a gallery, a museum, or a teaching center, but a set of room, study and work spaces, a file, a series of mechanisms (games) to circulate the objects and speeches that result from this experience, transient and casual invasions of public space.