A house in Oujda
The Morocco residency is built around a house in Oujda. The programme is funded by the collective and led on the ground by a local project leader, so the practical side of every stay rests with someone who is there. Oujda is the base: the place residents live in, work from and return to between journeys.
Craft journeys to Fez and Marrakesh
From that base, the residency travels. Residents make working trips to Fez and Marrakesh for Moroccan handcraft, above all zellige mosaic and ceramics. The craft cities are waypoints, not the home: residents go, sit with the craft, and carry what they find back to the house in Oujda.
The first two artists
The pilot cohort traveled in October and November 2025: Ingrid Arnsand Jonsson, a Swedish multidisciplinary artist, art director and illustrator, and Josefin Eklund, a Swedish neon artist whose light work gives the Stockholm gallery its sign. Moving between Marrakesh, Fez and Oujda across those two months, they arrived knowing each other’s work closely; earlier the same year the two had shown the duo exhibition Pneuma at the gallery on Svartensgatan 10 in Stockholm.
What a stay involves
A stay begins and ends in Oujda. Residents live and work from the house, with the project leader close at hand for everything local. The journeys to Fez and Marrakesh belong to the stay itself: time set aside to sit with zellige and ceramic craft and let it feed back into the resident’s own work.
Oujda is where the residency lives. Fez and Marrakesh are where it travels.
In their own words
Josefin Eklund and Ingrid Arnsand Jonsson traveled Marrakesh, Fez and Oujda in October and November 2025 as the residency’s first artists. This is what they took home.
For the first time in my life I could devote a whole week to art, around the clock, and new ideas were born that I would never have caught otherwise. I brought home new forms and colour combinations for my idea bank, and a far deeper respect for the craft after seeing the work behind every step of the mosaic. Meeting artists who cannot take their freedom of expression for granted made me want to truly use mine. I am completely certain that I will carry my impressions from the residency into my future work, in both concrete and abstract ways.
Josefin Eklund, Morocco traveling residency 2025
I have never experienced such a richness of colour as in Marrakesh, Fez and Oujda, and the mix of cities gave a picture of the country that one place alone never could. I spent the week without a computer, collecting impressions in a diary, sketches and text, and everything from the architecture to the leather dyeing in Fez comes with me into my textile work and 3D sculpting. It had been a long time since I felt such a wave of inspiration from every direction at once, fantastic and overwhelming at the same time. I got so much out of it, both as an artist and as a human being.
Ingrid Arnsand Jonsson, Morocco traveling residency 2025