Typography Collective, in collaboration with curatorial duo League of Tenders, is launching an open call for a one-month residency in May 2027, in Yerevan, Armenia.
Dedicated to traditional Armenian crafts and practices around — carpet weaving, dyeing, ornamentation, embroidery — The Shine of Our Eyes, at the same time, aims to expand a decolonial and feminist understanding of such practices and facilitate exchange between local and international masters and artists.
Although the traditions of weaving, ornamentation, or embroidery are part of preserved and acclaimed cultural heritage, they rarely evolve within the contemporary art scene. Through this residency, we aim to facilitate a dialogue where visual artists, especially women working with crafts, can exchange knowledge with, and learn from, Armenian traditions and masters. Together, they can weave translocal and transcultural meanings of their practices.
League of Tenders also believes that crafts can revalue what has been made invisible or devalued by the colonial order, constituting a decolonial perspective. People working with traditional crafts, through their work and way of thinking, show how these practices and objects are vessels for people’s memory, history, and worldviews. They can be carried within ornamentation, as subjects of the art pieces, as materials, or in the practice of making itself — forms that lie beyond appropriation by the imperial paradigm.
This resonates with how researcher Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes the reproduction of Algerian jewelry in her book The Jewellers of Ummah, which, for her, became a practice of “reviving the muscle memory of my ancestors’ craft” and “a way to get closer to them while trying to understand the division of labor in a preindustrial and precolonial world.”
The program will combine research and networking activities with public outcomes. Residents are very much welcome to share their skills and practices with local masters and the community within public and non-public events. The residency program will be tailored to the interests of the residents and further developed with professionals based in Armenia.
The selected participants will get:
• Modest accommodation in Yerevan, Armenia (separate room in a shared apartment with equipped kitchen, wi-fi, living room, etc.; not a hotel standard). Accommodation for partners and family members cannot be provided.
• Travel allowance: 400 EUR for travel distances under 5000 km; 800 EUR for travel distances of 5000 km or more, and possible top-ups for green ways of traveling.
• Daily allowance: 30 EUR per day.
• Curated program of guided tours, research trips, and visits.
Who is eligible to apply:
• Legally reside in a Creative Europe country (except Armenia), regardless of nationality. You can check the list of countries here.
• 18+ years old. There is no upper age limit.
• We are open to artists, curators, and researchers working with traditional crafts (especially weaving, wool, ornamentation, dyeing, etc.), confident in their practice, interested in broadening their perspective, and learning about Armenian crafts. If you position yourself more as a craftsperson or skillworker than an artist, you’re welcome to apply.
• Educational backgrounds don’t matter.
The residency is funded by Culture Moves Europe.
Total number of selected residents: 5.
Duration of residency: May 1–31, 2027. Participants are expected to be present in Armenia during the whole period of the residency.
The working languages of the residency are English and Armenian.
To apply, fill out this form by 23:59 CET on September 10, 2026: https://forms.gle/HfFW6QnfjBURH7yt6
Applications sent after the deadline will not be considered.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask us: typography.collective@gmail.com
Unfortunately, artists based in Armenia are not eligible to apply. But if you are an Armenia-based artist and interested in participating in the program, please contact us.
In the photo right: Wedding Carpet. Wool. Early 20th century, village of Berdashen, Artsakh. The carpet was made by the mother of Nina Arustmyan, a resident of Berdashen village, on the occasion of her daughter’s wedding. On view at the History Museum of Armenia (Yerevan).
In the photo up: Exposition of the Museum of National Architecture and Urban Life (Gyumri).
Design by un.d.
Photos by Elena Ishchenko.
About the project and organizers:
The Shine of Our Eyes
The Shine of Our Eyes is a multidirectional project initiated by League of Tenders to reposition handcraft practices as acts of memory, care, and resistance. It started as a series of closed-door dialogues with five women artists hailing from Central Asia, Idel-Ural, and the North Caucasus — Milyausha Abaydullina, Darali Leli, Aisha Jandosova, Aziza Kadyri, and Milana Khalilova. The project borrows its title from a Bashqort language metaphor “küz nury.” Used to describe the results of one’s hand labor, it is literally translated as “the shine of our eyes.”
An extensive publication, resulting from these dialogues, foregrounds embroidery, weaving, and textile work within the broader framework of decolonial aesthesis — as pathways toward healing, acts of remembering, and forms of cultural sovereignty. League of Tenders perceives the residency in Yerevan, Armenia, as a continuation of this dialogue and invites practitioners to join this conversation.
The publication is available at Ruyò Journal.
Typography Collective
Typography Collective is a translocal collective that views art practice as a discursive and political force, grounded in local contexts and driven by self-organized practices. It originated in Krasnodar, southern Russia, where its members organized Typography Center for Contemporary Art from 2012 until 2022. Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the designation as a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities, the team of the Center was forced to shut down the space in Krasnodar and leave Russia. Since then, Typography Collective has continued to work mostly non-publicly, organizing support, educational, and networking initiatives. One of Typography’s main projects is an apartment residency program in Yerevan, Armenia, active since 2022.
Aimed mostly at cultural practitioners from non-capital regions of Russia and thus non-public (due to security reasons), it also creates a platform for translocal connections.
Gradually returning to public activities, the Collective’s work reflects a need to re-engage with the issues that matter to its members — decolonial possibility, forced migration, state violence, and the challenges of being a collective across geographies, finding shared ground not in a single locality or venue, but in mutual intention and dispersed solidarity.
League of Tenders
An imaginary organization and curatorial duo, League of Tenders was founded by Elena Ishchenko and Maria Sarycheva in 2018 as a side program of Typography Center for Contemporary Art. At the core of the League’s practice is the desire to bring people, their practices, and ideas into unexpected dialogues, building friendships and solidarities across contexts and beyond imperial borders and nation-states. Often working outside conventional art spaces, League of Tenders develops exhibitions and public programs, as well as experimental collective formats such as laboratories, dinners, and performative events, both online and in person.
Rooted in decolonial possibility and an inclusive methodology shaped by Maria’s and Elena’s practices and approaches, the League’s projects have, over time, focused on disability representation, overcoming the alienation of everyday labor, practices of collective care, and anti-imperial imaginations.
In 2024–2025, the duo curated Vleeshal’s International Nomadic Program. Entitled Repetition Is a Form of Changing, their program centered around a collective attempt at rehearsing and practicing non-imperial and anti-colonial ideals as well as questioning the (western) knowledge behind feminism, language, ecology, care, and art itself. In 2026, League of Tenders will release the book My Song Resounds over Ruins, featuring multiple artistic positions resulting from the program.