Artists Residency

ARAC takes on the rehabilitation and activation of the former Gara Săcel, developing a model for the permanent use of railway heritage. The programme creates a cultural infrastructure that will go on operating beyond the span of any single edition and will host exhibitions, residencies, research, and projects dedicated to the community. Rather than treating the station as the setting for a one-off event, the association approaches it as a working institution to be kept in use year-round, with a calendar that accumulates over successive seasons and a set of functions — exhibitionary, residential, scholarly — that are meant to reinforce one another as the site matures.

The renovation is therefore directed at reactivating the interior spaces of the station, which will become residency spaces for artists, among them the former apartment of the traffic controller; these are fitted with everything required, such as a meeting space, a kitchen, and a bathroom — functional for the first time. Bringing plumbing and heating into rooms that had served a purely operational purpose marks a quiet but decisive shift: the quarters once organised around the running of trains are being reorganised around the needs of people who come to stay, work, and think in the building, so that spaces built for a railway logic acquire a domestic and studio life they never previously had.

The residency programme brings together international and local artists and curators alike, among them Julie Crenn (FR, curator) and Marie Maertens (FR, curator) in the 2024 and 2025 editions. The intention is for these visiting practitioners to work in close proximity to the valley and its inhabitants rather than at a remove from them, so that each residency leaves behind not only finished works but relationships, conversations, and lines of research that the next edition can pick up, gradually building a body of engagement anchored in Săcel and legible across the wider region.