Centre for Material Thinking

Residencies are an important part of our commitment to opening up an interdisciplinary space to explore questions of materiality, matter and making. We are also interested in how critical and creative practices can mutually inform one another and generate new insights.

Residencies are intended for research, the development of practice, and the development of new work or an existing project.

We welcome enquiries from artists, collectives and companies working broadly across theatre, performance, performance design, installation, film and media.

We can offer space, specialist advice and support, and access to technical resources.

The Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies has an established international reputation for site-specific and intermedial performance making, for analogue and experimental film practice, and for practice-based research. We enjoy a close partnership with and are situated very near to the Aberystwyth Arts Centre and the National Library of Wales.

Located between the Cambrian Mountains and Cardigan Bay, Aberystwyth offers an inspiring natural and cultural environment and is a hub for experimentation and creation.

We encourage you to contact us informally to discuss at an early stage what you would like to do and what your needs are. At present we are unable to offer funding for travel, accommodation or a fee to support your work. We can supply letters of support for funding applications and provide monetary costings for any in-kind support we provide via a residency.

As part of any residency we ask that you offer a sharing of your practice or a work-in-progress showing to colleagues associated with the CMT. Where appropriate, we may ask that you share insights into your practice and career with students in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.

We also ask that you acknowledge the support of CMT and the Department in any public work that emerges from your residency.

Please direct any initial enquiries about residencies to material-thinking@aber.ac.uk

Laura Cooper

I spent time filming the ocean with a Bolex and b/w 16mm film during my time at Aber Lab as well as processing, scanning, printing and projecting this footage, which I hope to involve in my ongoing film project Mountain Whale.

This project began during my time at ARCUS residency program in Japan, where I worked with a group of elderly wild boar hunters in Yasato, Ibaraki. I filmed the hunters’ daily activities trapping wild boar in the bamboo forests. I learnt that Wild boar is also referred to as Mountain Whale or Yama-kujira in Japanese. This poetic term evolved during the Edo period to circumvent hunting laws that condemned eating meat—fish however, which whales were mistaken as, were allowed to be eaten. The trickery in the name emphases the mechanism of deception and confusion in the process of camouflage. As the ocean begins to flood sections of the film, boars and whales become increasingly confused as do locations in Japan and the UK. This project continues my long-term investigation to the conflicting dynamics of care and dominance bound in human-animal relationships and is part of my Midlands 4 Cities (M4C) Practice based research PhD project at Birmingham School of Art.