A mountain pass is a route through a mountain range that allows crossing. It is a point of connection between two territories and a halfway destination of a longer journey. A pass is also a strait: a narrow passage in the sea between two lands. Reaching and crossing a pass involves effort, a project, a certain focus and the dream of accessing a different image of the landscape.
ARTISTIC RESIDENCES IN BORDER LANDS
PASSO NORD Residency Center is located in a mountainous area in the extreme north of Italy and at the same time in the extreme south of a culture in which it has always been immersed: the Tyrolean culture. It is a place whose most intimate vocation has always been crossing lands, mixing languages and cultures. It is a territory where marginality has been the driving force for experimenting new individual and collective structures for a thousand years. Therefore, North is not intended as an identity but as evoking altitude, as a useful point to guide research and to find the path among innumerable possibilities.
In the context of a national reference system of artistic residencies, TAA Passo Nord Residency Center is a place that temporarily welcomes artists and their research into a strong, binding and exciting landscape, far from big cities. It is the ideal place to come to terms with one's own limits and try to go beyond them. PASSO NORD is a network of very different centers of residency. Each of them has been existing for decades and has a particular vocation and a specific story. These two elements shift the concept of hospitality from the touristic level (which, as for TAA, has a strategic role in the local economy) to the artistic and cultural ones. Here, experiences coming from all over the world merge, as well as opportunities for exchanging skills and promoting professional growth and internationalization. Passo Nord is a plural form of hospitality tailored to the artists' needs. It offers curatorial and productive support. It allows the creation of relationships between professionals and local situations that have much to offer and to discover.