Orkney

What a fantastic week we spent together, during the 2025 Group Residency MICRO-MACRO.



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Please note that you can
APPLY NOW for 2026 Group Residency MICRO-MACRO, Orkney Islands, Scotland
Sat 20 June – Sat 27 June 2026
/ 7 nights, 8 days

Application deadline Sun 01 March 2026
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In Sept 2025, residents were welcomed to the historic Birsay area of Orkney. The Group Residency was led by Tracy Mackenna (she/her), artist, educator and curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal and facilitated by Tracy and programme contributors.

A fantastic range of subject-specific sessions was delivered by multidisciplinary Orkney-based experts who have in common site-specific, participatory and socially engaged practices revolving around sound and environment. Their diverse skills, expertise and modes of working were activated to investigate lost futures, intersectional histories, ecological and personal landscapes, experimental identities, ruin memory, trauma mapping, site recording, material and immaterial realms, deep time, marginalised communities and hidden lives.

As a group we were indoors, and out and about across the islands, working together and individually.

The aim of the Group Residency was to develop approaches to place that are experimental, inventive in their form, and that respond to place by paying attention to the intersections and collisions between art, culture, materiality, technologies and place. Opportunities were created for participants to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and analogue, for imagining new responses to places and the multiple, layered and contested histories they hold. Bringing together residents from a range of areas of practice and research, an international network was be established, and is now active.

MICRO-MACRO provided a partially-structured and hands-on programme of site-based ways of working that were shared to enable residents to develop their skills and understanding of how to investigate site as part of a creative practice and for public presentation to a global audience.

Our fantastic residents were Jacqueline Blanchard (CAN), Ali Darke (UK-ENG), Maddie Brooks Gillespie (NZL), Eilidh Guthrie (UK-SCT), Madison Hough (UK-ENG), Rona Kennedy (BEL, UK-ENG), Mauriah Donegan Kraker (USA), Sophia Matthews (USA, UK-ENG), Sophia Matthews (UK-SCT) and Sophia Matthews (ESP).

MICRO-MACRO was lead by Tracy Mackenna, Artist and Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal. Outstanding contributions to the programme in the form of presentations, site visits and exercises were given by Anne Bevan (Artist and Academic), Prof Mark Edmonds (Archaeologist) and Dan Lee (Futures Archaeologist).