A Space of Memory and Displacement

 

The Middle Rhine is a region shaped by movement—of histories, myths, and people. Along its course, time folds and unfolds, carrying both monumental events and forgotten narratives. It is a landscape that has inspired German Romanticism, where reality and fiction blur, and where boundaries—geographical, historical, and personal—remain fluid.

 

The Pipe and Turpentine Research Residency takes this fluidity as its conceptual starting point. Situated in a quiet location along the Middle Rhine, the residency offers a space for artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers, and researchers to explore the fragmentation of memory, the river as a shifting narrative boundary, and the instability of identity. Here, the landscape is not the subject of research but a setting—a space of retreat and reflection, where artistic inquiries into memory, displacement, and storytelling can unfold in ways that disrupt linear perception, embrace the spectral, and allow for slippages between the real and the imagined. Within this shifting terrain, narratives are not fixed but appear and disappear like apparitions, unreliable traces, or distortions of history, mirroring the uncanny qualities of Fantastik storytelling.

 

Collaboration with Taifun Project e.V. Düsseldorf

 

In collaboration with Taifun Project e.V., an international artist collective based in Düsseldorf, the residency extends beyond local geographies. Rather than anchoring itself to a specific place, it engages with broader questions of how memory is constructed, how landscapes influence perception, and how narratives form in the absence of fixed histories. By linking the residency’s setting with Düsseldorf’s urban artistic networks, the project fosters a dialogue between the rural and the global, the isolated and the interconnected.

 

Research Residency

 

The Pipe and Turpentine Research Residency is designed for artists and scholars working across disciplines, particularly those interested in non-linear storytelling, spectrality, and the tensions between presence and disappearance. It is not a residency focused on site-specific research but rather a space that allows participants to engage with their own artistic practice in a landscape that inherently embodies the themes of fluidity, transition, and narrative rupture. Here, reality is not stable but porous—a place where past and present bleed into each other, where objects and spaces hold uncertain meanings, and where the act of looking itself becomes an act of storytelling.

 

Rhine Research Exchange

 

Extending beyond a static residency model, the Rhine Research Exchange introduces a movement-based approach, inviting participants to follow the river as a conceptual and physical thread. Whether beginning in Düsseldorf or another point along its course, the river becomes a space of artistic and intellectual passage, mirroring the shifting nature of Fantastik narratives, where time and identity are never fixed but always in flux.

 

Through these initiatives, Pipe and Turpentine – Artistic Research & Residency positions itself as an international research platform, where artists and scholars can engage with ideas of movement, memory, and the uncertain boundaries between fiction and history. It is not bound to a single location but remains, like the river itself, a space of transition, encounter, and reinvention.