Linnaeus residency programme
Each year, Linnaeus University invites nationally and internationally active artists from various disciplines to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with university researchers through the Linnaeus Residency Programme. The complex and intertwined challenges of our time serve as a starting point for the questions, themes, and methods explored within the residency. Through mutual exploration and dialogue between different knowledge cultures, researchers and artists gain opportunities for unexpected perspectives that can foster cross-pollination, visibility, and transformative potential.
The Linnaeus Residency Programme focuses on interaction and collaboration between artists and the university’s research and education over a period of 4–8 weeks within a calendar year, offering space for individually tailored work and project development.
The programme, which both announces open calls and extends invitations, provides an artist’s fee, travel, accommodation, workspace, production funds, and process support. Participants are offered access to mentorship and public engagement opportunities, including presentations and a process/sketch exhibition at the university. Residents are invited to become part of a broad community of researchers, students, teachers, cultural practitioners, and social developers within the university and in collaboration with partner organizations in Småland and across Sweden.
The Linnaeus Residency Programme is run by The Cultural University, a part of the University Library. The Cultural University is a platform for arts and culture that encourages interdisciplinary collaborations through critical and creative dialogues and cultural experiences. Its primary mission is to enhance the interaction between culture and the university’s core activities in research, education, and collaboration.
Current residens
Brandon LaBelle (US)
Linnaeus Residency Programme, May 2025 - May 2026
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, resulting in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives.
As an artist in residence at the Cultural University, Linnaeus University, Brandon will be running a public seminar series under the title The Pirate Academyaddressing the topic of Poetic Knowledge.
With the establishment of artistic, practice-based research methods, art is increasingly understood as a form of knowledge production. As Tom Holert highlights, art today is predominantly viewed as “epistemic activity.” Such a development follows from the prevailing logic underpinning the global knowledge economy and the ways in which information and data function as new forms of power and currency. This seems to invite a number of questions, such as: What do we mean by knowledge production and in what way does a logic of production lead to particular ways of knowing? If art is largely a gesture of epistemic activity, what kind of knowledge does it make possible? And how might artistic methods contribute to movements of epistemic agency and the ongoing need for decolonizing knowledge practices?
Art and Science collaborations in the area of streght - The Core of Welfare
During his residency Brandon LaBelle will lead a workshop on The Listening Effect in collaboration with researchers in Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Sustainable Health as a part of the Rock Your Research Project, inviting to knowledge exchange between artists, researchers, and citizens. Workshops with students in the Nursing programme are being planned for the spring 2026.
Biography
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Read more about the residency and Brandon Labelle here.