Artist Residencies in Chile
A curated guide to residency programs, production spaces, and research-based initiatives supporting contemporary art in Chile.
In Chile, artist residencies are shaped by a strong tension between metropolitan concentration and territorial research. Much contemporary art production still passes through Santiago, where universities, independent spaces, museums, and artist-led networks create the most visible infrastructure for exchange. Yet the residency ecosystem cannot be reduced to the capital: many of its most relevant conditions emerge from Chile’s elongated geography, where artists working in residence often engage with desert landscapes, coastal cities, port histories, rural communities, and questions of ecology, extraction, memory, and displacement. In this sense, artist residencies in Chile tend to function less as isolated studio programs than as research frameworks, allowing artists, curators, and researchers to work through site-specific processes that require time, mobility, and local contact.
Contemporary art residencies in Chile are closely connected to broader debates within the country’s cultural infrastructure: how artistic practice moves between public institutions, independent initiatives, education, and community-based work. Residency programs in Chile often support production through open studios, workshops, public conversations, small exhibitions, or collaborative formats, creating a bridge between artistic research and public visibility. This gives the field a different rhythm from the commercial gallery system, even when it intersects with galleries in Chile or with museums and foundations mapped through contemporary art institutions in Chile. International artist residency programs also play an important role, but the most compelling dimension of the Chilean landscape lies in how local and visiting artists use residence as a way to investigate place, climate, social histories, and material conditions. Rather than forming a single centralized circuit, the residency scene supports a distributed model of contemporary art production in Chile, where time, geography, and research often matter as much as exhibition outcomes.
Selected Artist Residencies in Chile
A curated selection of residency programs supporting contemporary art production, research, and international exchange.
ISLA – Instituto Superior Latinoamericano de Arte
ISLA is the residency center developed by Corporación Cultural SACO in Antofagasta, connecting contemporary art production with the Atacama Desert, scientific contexts, and local communities. Its residency model supports artists, curators, teachers, and researchers through fieldwork, shared workspaces, exhibitions, talks, workshops, and public encounters linked to the northern Chilean territory.
It gives Chile’s residency ecosystem a northern anchor, linking contemporary art, research, astronomy, ecology, and desert-based cultural exchange.
CRAC Valparaíso
CRAC Valparaíso is an independent non-profit platform and residency center focused on socio-artistic production in the city of Valparaíso. Its residencies are oriented toward artists and researchers whose projects activate public space, local archives, workshops, talks, performances, seminars, and forms of exchange with communities and urban contexts.
CRAC remains one of Chile’s key independent residency models, treating the city as a site for research, archive, and public practice.
Bosque Pehuén Residency Program
Bosque Pehuén Residency Program, developed by Fundación Mar Adentro, is a multidisciplinary research residency in the Andean Araucanía, connecting visual arts, science, ecology, sound, history, and environmental education. Residents work in relation to a privately protected temperate rainforest, developing creative research that often involves fieldwork, collaboration with specialists, and public outcomes.
It gives Chile’s residency field a strong ecological research model, linking artistic production with conservation and southern forest knowledge.
B.A.S.E Tsonami
B.A.S.E Tsonami is the residency program of Tsonami Arte Sonoro in Valparaíso, supporting artists working with sound, listening, territory, public space, and experimental contemporary practices. Its residency model is research-oriented and often connected to the city’s geography, communities, festival context, radio projects, and public programs around sound-based artistic production.
It expands Chilean residency practice beyond visual display, positioning sound, listening, and urban territory as contemporary art research tools.
MAM Chiloé Artist Residency
The artist residency at Museo de Arte Moderno Chiloé supports artists working within the museum’s independent contemporary art environment on Chiloé Island. The program offers workshop and living spaces, access to the museum context, and contact with the local art scene, allowing residents to develop research or production in relation to the island’s cultural and territorial conditions.
It anchors residency practice within an independent museum framework, connecting contemporary production with Chiloé’s island geography and local artistic scene.
Valley of the Possible
Valley of the Possible is an independent residency for artists, curators, scientists, and cultural practitioners in the Chilean Andes. Its program supports self-directed and research-based projects around ecology, regenerative culture, ancestral knowledge, non-western narratives, and relations between creative practice and the natural world, with shared studios, fieldwork, workshops, and community-oriented activities.
It contributes a rural, regenerative model to Chile’s residency ecosystem, connecting artistic research with ecology, land-based practice, and intercultural exchange.
This is a curated selection of residency programs. Explore the broader contemporary art ecosystem of Chile.
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