Our current research stems from ongoing interests and past projects that relate to the loosely organized themes and keywords below. This list should give you a sense of the type of work we want to support by providing space and accommodations at the Deurendis site.

• “confluency” or intersections of social and ecological issues
• energy, landscape, and other ecological "literacies"
• urban-rural nexus: hinterlands, infrastructures, and peri-urban collaboration
• multi-species migration, place, and concepts of “home”
• biocultural restoration, eco-cultural heritage, and local/indigenous-centered land rights and management
• burnout, and relationship between rest and movement in histories of fugitivity and “retreat”
• manual labor, caloric labor, labor intensity, and non-fossil/capital regimes 
• place and non-place, localized globalisms, internationalism and solidarity 
• alternative ceremonies, rituals, and the design of liminal experiences, especially for queer communities

This list is non-exhaustive and will continue to change and expand as the project grows. We may occasionally elaborate on some of these themes to issue theme-specific calls for residency and event programs.

The curatorial research project Genres of Stewardship spotlights art projects and practices characterized by their connection to land, use of ecological processes, collaborative creation models, and intersectionality of ecological and social concerns. Diverse in form and scale, this growing field of work shares a politics of place, an ethics of care, and an emphasis on the cultural dimensions of land-based practice. Inviting broader questions around land claims, rights, access, and maintenance, ecological and political literacies, and infrastructures across urban-rural and postcolonial divides, attention to this work is crucial at a time of intertwined climate and geopolitical crises when such questions are of existential urgency.