Brainstorm your life

Your future is waiting to meet you in venice

SIX WEEK GAP YEAR PROGRAM FOR 18-27 YEAR OLDS IN VENICE ITALY

Transformative program to work on ideas and developing one’s own conscious future.

To connect self and society through art and other expressions of human experience — language, culture, architecture, food and physical being.  

To live at human scale and talk about the human condition and interpersonal understanding — beauty, power, politics, death and identity.  

To experiment with place, life story and visuality. 

PLACE

Live in singular locations as unique cultural expressions and as springboards to explore contemporary issues.

COMMUNITY

Connect on a deeper level as you explore culture and hospitality with locals and likeminded peers.

ART RESIDENCY

Enjoy the freedom to imagine, reflect and conceive your next personal project.

RESOURCEFULNESS

Become one with yourself. Reconnect mind, body and environment. Reignite the excitement of possibility.

GRAND TOUR

Be inspired by world leading innovators and creatives, cultural heritage, art and artisanal creations.

CONTEXT

Ground yourself in the wider world and align meaning and value to a global perspective.

BY THE END OF YOUR RESIDENCY

YOU FEEL RENEWED CONNECTION & THE POWERFUL ASSURANCE OF YOUR CAPABILITY TO MOVE FORWARD WITH INCOMPLETE INFORMATION. MORE CONFIDENT, YOU ARE DEVELOPING A NUANCED UNDERSTANDING OF your place in BUSINESS, SOCIETY & CULTURE. The clarity of your OFFLINE personality & EXPANDED INTERNATIONAL NETWORK GIVE YOU CONTROL OVER YOUR TRAJECTORY. You Can See The Future And YOu Feel Good.

in a world where you can learn absolutely everything online, we accentuate WHAT you can only do in person.

HOw it HAPPEnS

Through the challenge and alchemy of art.

The visual system is the brain’s largest single system.

Through the composite field of art we gain access to greater knowledge, expand our definition of who we are and bring ourselves closer to the unknown.

A visceral connection to alternate ways of seeing and being frees us to imagine new possibilities in order to chart a felicitous pathway forward.

RESIDENCY PROGRAM

People and Activities

  • Participants connect to their vision of themselves and create a "future" by first exploring possibility. We do this through the creative industries. Not to learn to compose, per se, but to think, be and imagine, with the freedom of a composer.

    From there we follow a series of guided steps to draw together the dots of each person's pathway — based on who they are, what's important to them, where they want to go in life and, by figuring out what they know and need to know.

  • Industry Insider workshops on key skills for the future: Connoisseurship, Protocol, Influence, Sales, Storytelling, Hallmarks, Finance, Branding.

    Subject insider introductions to the foundational ideas underpinning their work and the key influences shaping their industry today.

  • Workshops explore materials and techniques with hands on production and site visits.

    Artisans and crafts people lead manual projects to impart process and craft with a beneficial centring side effect.

  • Local and regional expert guided excursions as relate to key historical, global or regional developments.

  • Residents are invited to present their work and ideas, attend screenings and other live evening entertainments. Learn how to interview, present, debate, bring something to the table, critique and be critiqued.

  • You will become part of many things while you are here.  

    Most significantly you will be part of a family of likeminded people from around the world.

    How to live in a place is complemented with exercise, cooking, language, sustainable management and hospitality.

Concepts and Challenges

  • A way to inhabit a personality, an identity, a physicality, a status and by extension an examination of ourselves. What we should be, what we are, what we could be, what we want to be.

    Over the course of the program, we examine what makes drama and how to create experience. We will learn about presence and presentation. We will undertake several workshops to inform our own character development under theatrical direction.

  • Our immersion and inhabitation projects take us into the body by adopting postures or ideas and making them relevant to our selves. In this way we can confront ideas in a non-threatening way and learn to discuss them from a stand point of curiosity. What does something feel like - a decision, a space, a way of being?

    Embodied cognition is where the environment, our body and motor systems work in conjunction with the brain to convey and construct meaning. It may include changes that result when our bodily states change or previously experienced states of being.

  • Every discipline has a vocabulary. Masters in their discipline develop their own vocabulary.

    Understanding vocabulary is key to understanding many facets of life : culture, politics, networks, events.

    We focus on vocabulary that is spoken, unspoken, visual and cultural.

    We also encourage active listening, especially to our own vocabulary.

  • Dialogue and cooperation, negotiation, hospitality and protocol, precedence and tradition — an understanding geared towards eliminating cultural, sectoral, and knowledge barriers and affirming difference.

  • We will live a seasonally infused life and menu and learn how to transform experience through food.

    We will become an interdependent community of people, learning how local identities, livelihoods and family histories are intertwined.

    We will experience the work/life balance that is created by valuing hospitality.

  • Body work is included in our program through the work of artists, dancers, choreographers, performers.

    Workshops invite us to fully ‘inhabit’ our own bodies — gain awareness and create acceptance.

    Rhythm-based exercise takes place several times a week:

    • Tai Chi : to improve your immune system, boost heart health, and help your brain.

    • regional specialty sports put you in touch with the environment & nature.

    • Yoga or Run with a local : are optional community dimensions for those who practice regularly.

    • Partnered dance, such as Tango.

+ YOU

Your unique contribution.

And your unique community.

  • Practice any art...no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

    Kurt Vonnegut, writer

  • Art dies when crowds inspire its destinies.

    Hermann Maier Lund, music critic

  • Culture is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity

    Aristotle, philosopher

  • We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.

    Rick Rubin, music producer

  • our effort, our desire, our continual longing... To make meaning of the world around us through materials

    Sarah Sze, Visual Artist, Columbia University

  • Culture is the only asset of humanity that, when divided between us all, becomes greater

    Hans Georg Gadamer, philosopher

  • Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement.

    Sir Ken Robinson, Arts in Schools Project

  • What I did learn early on is that film-making is transformative. It turns you into a different person.

    Wim Wenders, film maker

  • Things rarely go as planned... but you have a choice: You can either crumble in defeat or create something unexpected and beautiful.

    Suleika Jaouad Batiste, writer

  • Comparison is the thief of joy.

    Theodroe Roosevelt, Nobel laureate 1906

  • The Creative Industries are vital for sustainable development.

    Marisa Henderson, United Nations

  • How, exactly, is one to fully inhabit one’s experience at a time when three and a half billion of us are sharing our thoughts on the Internet

    Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

  • Students who have taken a year or two off are much more ready to learn, much more ready to encounter diversity of views .

    Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy

  • The skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

    Temple Grandin, author & professor of behavioural science

  • The capacity of theatre to transform lives through personal empowerment

    Kate Winslet, actor

  • What Hopper discovered was that when the people are gone, the buildings come to life.

    Christopher Benfey, Emily Dickinson Scholar

  • The only constant in life is change.

    Heraclitus, philosopher

  • Solitude creates clarity. Clarity creates meaning.

    Mike Erwin, Positivity Project

  • The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

    Marcel Proust, novelist

  • Chance has always been my best assistant

    Agnès Varda, artist

  • I am a part of all that I have met

    Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet

  • I feel at home everywhere. You’re at home in your mind, and if you’re at home with whatever you do, then you’re quite relaxed any place.

    Nicolas Berggruen, philanthropist

  • Art is the highest form of hope.

    Hans Ulrich Obrist

LEARN MORE

I AM …

  • Venice

    Brussels - Coming soon