Rose Bouthillier is a contemporary art curator and writer based in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Bouthillier currently serves as the Artistic Director of the Bonavista Biennale, and she Co-Curated the 2023 Biennale, Host, with Ryan Rice. Previously, she held curatorial roles at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and served as a curatorial correspondent for the inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018). Her writing has been published in magazines and journals including CURA., C Magazine, BlackFlash, Foam Magazine, esse, and frieze, and she works as the Social Media Manager and Archivist for the online art publication Momus. While at ARCUS, Bouthillier plans to research artists and institutions in Japan, with a focus on those working in relation to oceans and oceanic lifeways, developing opportunities for future collaborations.
www.rosebouthillier.com

Dominica is an duo-national Russian and British artist and a researcher working in the intersection between animation, performance and installation. Her films have been shown in the international film festivals and supported through BFI Network and Arts Council England as well long-listed for BAFTA Awards. Her work have been exhibited in solo shows in Edinburgh, Bath and Leicester (UK) and group shows in Douro Printmaking Biennale (Portugal) , AGA Lab (Holland) , ANNY (USA), Anna Arbor Centre (USA), Megalo Print Prize (Australia). She has collaborated on mural, illustration and performance projects with artists from Kathmandu, Oaxaca, Odissa, New York and London and has travelled around Europe, Asia and America with artist residencies programs. She currently lectures Animation and Illustration at Manchester Metropolitan University. At ARCUS, Dominica will be working on a research project investigating material artifacts connecting British folklore and magic history with Shinto traditions in Japan, drawing parallels between the ritualistic practices between two cultures.
www.nicaharrison.com

Eline De Clercq is a visual artist, writer and researcher in the field of art and ecology. Her practice starts from the intersection of gender and lesbian identity. Her artistic research takes place in the historical garden of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, together with the students she organizes a weekly community event for multi-species awareness. In 2018 she founded Wool Publishing, a platform for intersectional representation in exhibitions and print. In 2019 she started the Gesamthof, a Lesbian Garden located between kunsthal Extra City and Morpho vzw. This art-nature project is the entry point for raising curiosity about decolonial practices and storytelling in an ecofeminist garden. During this residency at ARCUS research, Eline will visit gardens to expand her research into traditional and contemporary Japanese gardening and to create a dialogue about ecology together.
www.elinedeclercq.com

Angelica Ong is an artist working primarily in photography and artist books. With a focus on slow art and language, she explores ephemera, the human body, and everyday subject matter, inviting audiences to discover monumentality in minutiae. She also works in multiple languages, which she often leaves untranslated. Ong has exhibited work in solo and group shows at SITE Sharp Gallery (Chicago), W. Gallery (Chicago), and Mana Contemporary (Chicago), amongst others. Her work has been collected by the Ohio State University Libraries and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. During this residency, Ong will investigate experiences of time in relation to tides and the moon through the lens of poetics towards the development of a new artist/photo book, conducting literature reviews on horology and Japanese haikus, which inherently address time’s passing, compiling observational records of the moon and tides, and investigating alternative processes for producing photograms of waves.
www.angelicaong.art

Photo: Adriaan van der Ploeg

Working with performance, video, research and writing, Michiel Huijben’s practice is concerned with interactions between (architectural) design, politics, and society. In 2013, he completed a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, followed by an MA Architectural History & Theory at the Cass, London. Influenced by his backgrounds in both fine art and architectural theory, his work moves between the languages and aesthetics of both these fields. In recent years, he has presented work at Kunstinstituut Melly and the New Institute in Rotterdam; De Appel, Amsterdam; ExtraCity Kunsthal in Antwerp and Kunsthalle Basel, among many other institutions. During his residency at ARCUS, he will conduct field research in and around Tsukuba Science City, a mixture between garden city, university campus, and suburb, with green spaces between laboratories, offices, and residential buildings. This local research will inform a series of (video) works about planned communities, urban planning, and their relationships to utopian thinking.
www.michielhuijben.nl

Éric Omar Camarena is an artist, architect and professor. His interests lie in the intersection of architecture, media and landscape, and in the relationship between technology and storytelling in the construction of realities. He has lectured and exhibited works surrounding these topics in Mexico and the United States, with the support of Art OMI, New York’s International Arts Center, Aramauca Center For Contemporary Arts, by Mexico’s National Fund for Arts and Culture, and its National Center for the Arts. He currently teaches Architectural Design, History and Theory at the University of the Americas Puebla. At ARCUS, he plans to do research in advance of the production of a series of sound art and design works concerned with the depiction of natural landscapes within indoor environments.
http://ericomarcamarena.info/

Chloé Viton develops a personal mythology that revolves around recurring obsessive forms, relationships to language, and the world around us, in constant metamorphosis through performance, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her works and performances have been presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Panacée (Montpellier), and many other institutions in Europe. Viton graduated from the Ecole supérieure des Beaux Arts de Montpellier in 2017. She has participated in the residency program organized by MO.CO during the Cochin Biennale (India), Venice Biennale (Italy), and Istanbul Biennale (Turkey) in 2018. During her residency program at ARCUS Research, she will conduct in-depth research on Onibaba, a creature in Japanese folklore, in connection with unconsciousness and dreams.
https://www.chloeviton.fr

Léone-Alix Mazaud is an artist and a PhD candidate at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) with the architecture and urban design firm PCA-STREAM, working at the intersection of Science and technology studies and Design research. Her work focuses on the relationships human societies develop with the rest of the living world in relation with the way they design their built environments. She highlights in particular how the tools involved contribute to perpetuating such relationships. Through design experiments of alternative tools based on sentient and sensitive approaches, she explores speculated alternative urban realities to make more-than-human entities count in urban production and allow for multispecies worldings.During the residency, she will investigate the Japanese urban planning, design practices and tools regarding the relationship to the living – framed as biodiversity -, as well as experiment with formal and conceptual modes of immersion involving sound to support the urban design practice.
https://www.instagram.com/leonalix_ma/

Noémie Soula is an artist and researcher using storytelling and craft as creative tools to explore biotechnologies, genetics, and the relationship between human and non-human. Playing with the visceral and the liminality between reality and fiction, the created artworks, physical or digital, act as a wake-up call, an uncanny event stimulating the audience’s imagination. During her residency programme, she will develop Becoming Futakuchi-Onna, a project exploring connections between this traditional Japanese folktale and our contemporary society aiming to encourage bio-activism and women to access STEAM careers. She was the selected artist to receive The Da Vinci Labs’ LEONARDO REBOOTED grant in the Synthetic Biology category in 2022 to create her last project Mythical Living Data exhibited as a solo show in the Moore St. Electrical Substation as part of No Bounds Festival (Sheffield). Recent exhibitions and artist talks include Epidermotopia (Paris), NEW NOW Festival (Essen), and Giudecca Art District (Venice).

Aggie Toppins is a graphic designer and published critic who writes about design in social and cultural contexts. She appraises the roles of history and historicism in the field, advocating for methodologies that illuminate design’s social performativity. Her writing embraces design narratives decoupled from universalism and capitalism, drawing on intersectional feminism and materialist theory to explore questions of activism, taste, and meaning-making. During her residency program, she worked on Thinking Through Graphic Design History: Challenging the Canon, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. 
https://aggietoppins.com

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker working with film as an instrument. Composed as film-poems, her films walk along territories and events haunted by the ever-lasting impacts of internal and external forms of colonialism and their imprint on land, human and other-than-human forms of life. Her films have been screened in film festivals and institutions such as the Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, LUX Moving Images, NYFF and IFFR. Recent exhibitions include Sheherazade, at night, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), 12th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions (Tokyo), and 36th Panorama of Brazilian Art “Sertão” at MAM – Museum of Modern Art (São Paulo)
https://www.vimeo.com/anavaz