Open Call: Watery Commons Residencies 2025

We are pleased to announce the Connecting Threads 2025 residency programme, offering up to six paid and supported residency opportunities for creative practitioners who are based in the River Tweed catchment area.

The residency begins with an initial Encounters week in June during which all selected residents will spend time together with the Connecting Threads programming team along the River Tweed.

Thereafter, each resident has two months to undertake the remaining three weeks of the residency at their own pace. During this time, in conversation with the Connecting Threads team, you will develop something to share during our October River Conference.

Connecting Threads works with diverse communities along the river Tweed, including those who face systemic obstacles to cultural participation. We welcome applications from people who are underrepresented in the culture sector, including but not limited to Black artists, artists of colour, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller artists, working-class artists and those with low income, D/deaf, disabled or neurodiverse artists, those without formal arts qualifications, and other artists who identify as marginalised.

How to apply

• Download the residency information pack for full details.
• Download an application form.
• Please complete the equalities monitoring form.

The deadline for expressions of interest is Monday 31 March, 9am.

Watery Commons

Our artist residencies form a key strand of our programme for 2025, under the overall theme of Watery Commons.

We loved this phrase, Watery Commons, when we encountered it in Hydrofeminism, a 2012 book by cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, and we’re excited to hear how it resonates for artists and creative practitioners in the River Tweed catchment area.

We’re interested in your ideas of a watery commons that might bubble up on multiple scales across time and place. How can artists and creative practitioners navigate connections between the local and the global, the bodily and the systemic, the material and the metaphorical?

Our focus is the River Tweed, its habitats, ecologies, communities and culture. For our 2025 residency programme, we want to hear from artists who wish to engage the specific ecosystems of the Tweed through planetary flows of water, and attending to all that the water carries with it (seeds, stories, fish, larvae, microscopic bacteria, memories, sweat, dreams, blood, economic policies, agricultural pesticides, industrial effluents, borders, sewage…).

We recognise that the term ‘commons’ has been used in many different ways. Traditionally, ‘the commons’ refers to areas of land characterised by shared uses that challenged feudal and capitalist models of property ownership. They were lands shared for the common good, not subjected to extraction or exploitation. Recently, the term ‘commons’ has been used more expansively (for example, ‘creative commons’ refers to digital models of sharing and reuse). We’re asking: what are the dimensions of a rivery commons? We want to dive into these ideas with you, always from the position that there can be no meaningful thinking of the commons which is not at the same time political.

We want to hear from artists who believe in a watery commons. What does the phrase mean to you? A relic from the past? An imagined future? Or a network of relationships that we already inhabit right now, in the present?

The full quotation that has inspired us is below:

“We live in a watery commons, where the human infant drinks the mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the fish, the fish are consumed by the whale. The bequeathing of our water to another is necessary for the custodianship of this commons. But when and how does gift become theft, and sustainability usurpation?”

Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism (2012)

The fee

Each selected artist/maker will receive a total fee of £3,780 to take part in the residency. This fee comprises the initial Encounters Week (5 days), and three subsequent independent weeks (15 days). The fee is broken down as follows:

• £945 to take part in the residential Encounters Week, 15 – 20 June. Accommodation is provided, transport and food costs are covered.
• £2,835 for three additional weeks (15 days) of independent residency time from 1 July – 31 August (£945 per week).

The application process

We have attempted to minimise the amount of unpaid labour that artists are asked to undertake when applying for residencies and other opportunities. We have therefore structured the application process in two stages.

• Stage 1: Expression of Interest

This is an opportunity to tell us about your practice and what has drawn you to apply to this residency.

• Stage 2: Shortlisting

The Connecting Threads team will select up to 12 of the expressions of interest and invite the applicants to develop a more detailed proposal in response to the theme of ‘Watery Commons’. The applicants will be paid £350 for one day’s work.

We are delighted to be working with artists Bint Mbareh and Jack Ky Tan as panellists who will join the Connecting Threads team to select up to 6 artists for the residency.

Please note: these residencies are only open to artists or creative practitioners who live, work or study in the River Tweed catchment area. We have made an interactive map to show the limits of the catchment area and there is also more detail in the info pack.

Online information session

We are holding an online information session on 18th March about our 2025 residency programme. This is being led by members of the Connecting Threads programming team, including River Culture Curator Tiki Muir, and is BSL interpreted and captioned.

We recommend attending if you're interested in applying, as this is a chance to meet us and ask any questions about the application process and the residency itself.

Register here.

Key dates

• 18th March, 6.30 - 7.30pm: online information session
• 31st March, 9am: deadline for expression of interest
• 31st March – 4th April: shortlisting of applications
• 4th April: communication of shortlist decision
• 7th – 28th April: paid proposal development period for shortlisted artists
• 28th April, 9am: deadline for developed proposals:
• 28th April – 2nd May: selection of proposals
• 8th May: communication of selection decision
• 15th – 20th June: Encounters week
• 1st July – 31st August: subsequent residency period (15 days per artist)
• 24th – 26th October (exact dates tbc): River Conference

How to apply

• Download the residency information pack for full details.
• Download an application form.
• Please complete the equalities monitoring form.

The deadline for expressions of interest is Monday 31 March, 9am.