Process, Not Product: Onassis AiR 2026/27 as a Radical Space for Research, Collaboration, and Situated Reflection – The Onassis AiR 2026/27 Open Call invites thirty international practitioners across disciplines—from visual arts, sound, and dance to writing, film, and curatorial research—to immerse themselves in a ten-week residency that redefines what it means to dwell, think, and create within a shared artistic ecosystem, based in Athens and embedded in the Onassis Culture infrastructure, this residency operates as a laboratory of transdisciplinary encounter where production pressure is suspended in favour of speculative research, critical inquiry, and sustained dialogue, what distinguishes Onassis AiR is not only its material support—enhanced artist fee, housing, research budget, and travel—but its ideological commitment to art as an evolving, processual practice, resisting the demand for performative outputs and instead foregrounding infrastructures of care, listening, and peer exchange, a notable development in the upcoming cycle is the collaboration with the Cavafy Archive, a partnership that opens poetic and archival dimensions for new research trajectories, particularly for those navigating text-based or historical methodologies, simultaneously, the residency expands its material focus via Onassis Ready, integrating crafts, fashion, and applied design into the wider community of AiR, thereby collapsing false binaries between conceptual and embodied practices, a key feature of the programme is the Open Days, where participants share glimpses into their research process rather than finished works, reaffirming that unfinishedness itself can be a rigorous aesthetic form, beyond resources, what truly defines Onassis AiR is its emphasis on collective intelligence, where curated visits, feedback sessions, and co-learning structures generate a plurivocal and politically aware creative environment, this is particularly urgent in a context where precarity and symbolic extraction increasingly dominate the art world; here, the residency responds by fostering a more sustainable, situated, and responsive form of engagement, where the right to opacity and refusal is protected as much as production is supported, thus, the value of Onassis AiR lies not in what is shown, but in what is incubated: ideas that take time, relationships that hold tension, and practices that resist finality.
