Place and mobility in Italian artist residencies: towards an analytical framework

This paper explores artist residencies as place-based cultural infrastructures that connect artistic mobility, cultural production and territorial development. It situates residency programmes within broader debates on overtourism and alternative travel practices, including slow and experiential tourism, suggesting that they may be interpreted as contemporary reconfigurations of the educational and cultural legacy of the Grand Tour. Adopting an exploratory desk-based qualitative approach, the study draws on policy documents, institutional databases, residency calls and curatorial texts to map the Italian residency landscape across three analytical dimensions: ministerial exchange programmes, foreign academies in Rome, and grassroots initiatives operating in peripheral territories. Rather than presenting residencies as a normative response to the pressures of mass cultural tourism, the paper examines them as analytically distinct forms of cultural mobility whose specific temporalities, spatial logics and governance arrangements may generate different forms of engagement with host places. Although exploratory in nature, the analysis provides a number of interpretative insights from the Italian context. It suggests that artist residencies may be understood as emerging infrastructures of place-based development, capable of connecting artistic mobility, cultural production and territorial regeneration, while also revealing important tensions related to governance arrangements, funding stability and uneven territorial embeddedness. These findings indicate that residencies represent distinctive forms of cultural mobility and learning, offering opportunities for creative experimentation and the reactivation of territories, although their contribution to sustainable place development cannot be assumed a priori and remains contingent upon institutional and contextual conditions. Rather than constituting an alternative to tourism per se, residencies are better understood as complementary practices that privilege longer-term engagement, reciprocity and cultural exchange over short-term consumption. Despite its exploratory character, the paper contributes to place management scholarship by proposing an analytical framework through which artist residencies can be examined as embedded cultural practices that inform contemporary debates on mobility, placemaking and territorial development.