TED, the global platform for ideas and storytelling, and POSCA, a creative brand by uni Brands Corporation, are launching a new kind of artist residency: a globally distributed cohort of artists working across different geographies, cultures, and communities, united by a shared drive to shape public life through art.
Fine Acts, the external curatorial partner selected by TED & POSCA, is leading the curation, creative direction, and coordination of the initiative.
There is no single location. No central studio. Instead:
Meet the five selected artists and collectives for the TED & POSCA Global Artist Residency!
From Spain and Brazil to the Mediterranean and the United States, our residents will explore what repair can look like through art – and how creativity can help inspire us to reconnect with each other, our communities, and the natural world.
We are thrilled to welcome Mikhaela Martin, Mundano, Bli Bla Blu (Antoine Bertin, Cristina Tarquini, Alex Jordan), LÁOLÚ, and Candy Chang & James A. Reeves as our first residency cohort!
Each brings a bold, original, and very different approach to mending: transforming neglected public spaces,
responding to environmental destruction, reconnecting with marine life, celebrating identity and cultural heritage, and creating opportunities for collective reflection and healing.
We can’t wait to see their visions come to life.
THANK YOU to every artist who shared their ideas with us. Choosing just five out of 3,590 submissions was incredibly difficult. We were amazed by the range of perspectives, creativity, and possibilities for repair that artists brought to this call.
THE GOOD NEWS? We’ll be launching this open call two more times over the next couple of years. Plus, other exciting opportunities are on the horizon, too. So stay tuned!
BLI BLA BLU
Bli Bla Blu is a Mediterranean art–science collective that features Antoine Bertin, Alex Jordan and Cristina Tarquini. Antoine is a digital artist working where science, listening and community meet, using field work, interdisciplinary practice and digital processes to connect people to the ocean through sensorial experiences. He is completing a practice-based PhD on listening (Interfacing the Ocean – ZHdK). His work has been recently shown on NTS radio, with Serpentine and at the Venice Biennale. Alex leads the Behavioural Evolution Research Group. Using computer vision and machine learning in lakes, oceans and forests, he asks what can be known of the subjective experience of other animals, especially fish. He collaborates with artists, architects and philosophers, with work shown at the Venice Biennale, the Serpentine, The Shed and Desert X. Cristina is an artist and creative director turning science, data and speculative futures into immersive experiences people feel, play with, and remember.
For the residency, Bli Bla Blu will explore our relationship with marine life and how art can help repair the connection between humans and the underwater world.
MIKHAELA MARTIN
Mikhaela is an Italo-Brazilian artist based in Barcelona, Spain, whose practice is rooted in the intersection of public art, urban space, and human connection. Influenced by a family background in landscape architecture and urban planning, she views the city as a living canvas shaped by memory, movement, and collective experience. Her work has taken her across Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, where she has created large-scale murals and public interventions while collaborating with students, local communities, and women in vulnerable situations.
For the residency, Mikhaela will focus on repairing public spaces and strengthening the connections between people and the places they share.
MUNDANO
Mundano is a Brazilian artivist and an advocate for environmental causes and human rights. He is the founder of the NGO Pimp My Carroça and the Cataki app. In recent years, he has collected residues from the largest environmental crimes in the country’s history, creating his own pigments from toxic mud, forest fire ashes, and crude oil spilled on northeastern beaches. Through his artivism, he actively fights against the climate emergency. His work has been presented at major international events, including the G20 at Parque Lage and COP30 in Belém.
For the residency, Mundano will explore environmental repair, using art to respond to ecological destruction and inspire collective action.
CANDY CHANG & JAMES A. REEVES
Candy and James create participatory installations that introduce new rituals into communities. Their 2021 installation, After the End, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick: “a place to mourn, meditate and perhaps heal a little.” Exhibiting in New York, Hong Kong, London, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, their decade-long collaboration combines Candy’s background in architecture and urban planning with James’ in film and music. Their work has been exhibited in the Rubin Museum, Green-Wood Cemetery, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Broad Art Museum.
For the residency, Candy and James will explore emotional and collective repair, creating space for reflection, connection, and healing.
LÁOLÚ
LÁOLÚ is a Nigerian bred, Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist with a wide-spanning background in music, performing arts, visual art, human rights law, cultural ambassadorship, and activism. Having started his career in law, he says he has always sought to help others reveal their truth. Guided by the idea that everything is his canvas, LÁOLÚ seeks to leave a part of his art and Yoruba heritage wherever he goes. His work has been presented at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Grammy Museum. As a cultural custodian, he has contributed to landmark moments in visual storytelling, from Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) to Paramount’s Children of Blood & Bone (2027).
For the residency, LÁOLÚ will focus on personal and cultural healing, exploring repair through identity, heritage, and human connection.
This year’s residency theme, Visible Mending, explores repair as a creative and civic act. Inspired in part by Kintsugi – the Japanese practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold – the theme invites artists to consider how wounds, ruptures, and imperfections can become sites of transformation rather than something to hide.
Across communities around the world, people are finding ways to mend relationships, restore ecosystems, strengthen social bonds, and rebuild trust. We invite artists to investigate these processes of repair and make them visible through public interventions that spark reflection, dialogue, and collective imagination.
In 2026, five artists and collectives were selected to develop community-rooted public interventions to be implemented in 2027. Each selected artist receives a total of USD $15,000 to cover artist fees, production costs/community activation, and documentation of the work.
While the term of the residency is one year, this initiative will run for multiple years, expanding the cohort year by year (2027, 2028, and 2029), while building an evolving global archive of civic artistic interventions connected through a shared conceptual framework.
Art can help repair what’s broken. Mending can reveal strength. Imagination can be resilience. Beauty can be a form of civic action.
With these convictions in mind, TED & POSCA are building a different kind of artist residency: a globally distributed cohort of artists working across different geographies, cultures, and communities, connected through a shared conceptual framework around repair, resilience, hope, beauty, and civic imagination.
There is no single location. No central studio. Instead, artists work within their own communities, developing projects that unfold in public space and invite participation, reflection, contribution, and collective imagination. Community engagement is structurally embedded into the work itself, and process matters as much as outcome.
At a time increasingly shaped by fragmentation, isolation, and diminishing shared spaces for reflection, we believe art can serve as a powerful tool: capable of revealing invisible experiences, transforming everyday environments, generating dialogue across differences, and creating forms of connection that conventional institutions often struggle to produce.
Rather than approaching art solely as an object of display, the residency supports artistic practices that engage directly with people, communities, local realities, and shared experience. Each intervention remains deeply rooted in its own context while contributing to a broader collective narrative about participation, imagination, repair, renewal, and the social possibilities of art.
The TED & POSCA Global Artist Residency ultimately exists to support artists who are actively engaging with the social fabric of their communities – artists whose work reminds us that collective imagination, visible acts of repair, and shared acts of meaning-making remain essential cultural forces.
Creativity & Connection Partner
POSCA is a creative brand empowering artists everywhere with versatile, high-quality paint markers and art supplies that work across virtually any surface. An enabler of civic creativity and personal expression, POSCA supports artists in sharing their talent and brightening the spaces around us through participatory, community-embedded projects – fostering renewal, dialogue, and collective expression.
Strategic Media & Global Impact Partner
TED is a nonprofit that believes powerful ideas, powerfully presented, move us: to feel something, to think differently, to take action.
Curation & Coordination Partner
Fine Acts is a global nonprofit creative studio partnering with artists and movements to drive social change through art.
