The Karoussos Residency Programme at the Karoussos Center supports researchers in developing new approaches to Byzantine art and culture with cutting-edge scholarships that contribute to the understanding and preservation of cultural heritage through emerging technologies. Scholars have the opportunity to spend considerable time in one of the world’s leading archives during their stay, where they will join an international community of scholars and researchers. Scholars reside at the Karousos Center in the Peloponnese region, a fully restored 18th-century Maniot residence that houses the Karousos Archives, which through virtual, hybrid, and augmented reality environments creates a pioneering path to cultural heritage on a global scale.
Supported by the Creative Europe programme, the Spyro residency programme focuses on St. Spyridon Chapel, which lies right next to the Center of the Karoussos Archives and, as a pre-revolutionary monument, is protected by the laws of Cultural Heritage. In 2021 Karoussos Archives undertook the revival of the chapel, in order to reinstate the monument, considering its artistic and cultural values. The project transcended standards across all artistic and religious fields to initiate the groundbreaking visualisation of hybrid frescoes and profound metanarratives of its cultural context. The chapel of St. Spyridon, in Verga, is a model of creative management of cultural heritage, at a global level, created in the context of the organisation’s action for the re-establishment of Byzantine monuments. Freed from a linear framework of knowledge production, hybrid frescoes, and their linked metanarratives open up numerous powerful possibilities for cultural initiatives. To open up these possibilities, Karoussos Archives advances on to the next phase of the chapel’s regeneration, which addresses its reintegration into modern society. For this reason, Karoussos Archives welcomes scholars who work across the fields of art, culture, and humanities to build together strategic cultural policies of cultural participation, social cohesion, and innovation, so as to promote better access and wider connection in the chapel’s new cultural framework.
The residency will take place 9-30 April 2024, with online sessions once a month during January – March 2024.
The programme is fully funded and covers the following: round-trip air tickets, accommodation, meals, transportation for scheduled visits. Applicants must legally reside/live in one of the 40 Creative Europe countries, excepting Greece. The programme is mainly targeted at interdisciplinary scholars in the early stages of their careers. Applicants must have a bachelor’s degree in one of the following fields: visual arts, integrated arts, cultural management, humanities, and/or digital humanities. Applicants with a Master’s or a PhD in the aforementioned subjects will be strongly welcomed. Recommended age of applicants is 25-40.
