Residency Program
Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, México

The program exists to promote social development through the arts by facilitating mutually beneficial cultural exchanges between artists in any discipline from all over the world and the people, ecology, and ethos of coastal Oaxaca. We host three to six artists at a time in five or six week sessions on the beach north of Puerto Escondido. Every one of our residents is required to find a meaningful way to connect in one of the communities around Casa Wabi through a reciprocal community project. Social connections and cultural cross-pollination are the focus, rather than the production of a specific body of work. We expect our residents to plant seeds of inspiration here in Oaxaca and to spread what they take away.

We believe that our concept of community should expand to cross boundaries of every description; that exposure to the strengths of multiple specific intrinsic cultures is a universal recipe for individual growth; and that sharing different ways of thinking is a socially redeeming and sustainable way to strengthen society.

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THE COMMUNITY PROJECT

All of our residents are required to make a connection in one of the communities around Casa Wabi. (We define community very broadly—in a way that covers, for example, everyone and everything from a specific local musician to the Pacific Ocean.) Every community project starts with a proposal—which can be directly related to the artist’s work, but doesn’t have to be. These proposals serve as a starting point for initiating a process of match-making and refinement through conversation that ultimately produces an approved project.

Over time we have learned to (largely) abjure projects that involve permanent installations of public art or the kind of expert-to-layperson workshops that are typical of public museums. Both of these modalities tend to produce single-directional, and therefore one-dimensional, experiences for everyone involved. Even with projects designed with student collaborators in mind, and we do many, we tend to privilege collaborations that produce coequal experiences and  relationship building over any material result. (Joint failure is a better group experience than a unitarily directed “success.”)

Our staff work with incoming residents to identify potential community collaborators and to ensure that every project is rooted in mutual interests and shared benefits. Most proposals end up being fine tuned or completely reworked to dovetail successfully with a specific community’s interests. The most successful projects are often those that stray furthest from original conception in the process of adapting to local conditions.

Creative collaboration of this sort is not for everyone. It requires a lot of comfort with the uncertainties of relationship building. But with open minds, a generosity of spirit, and flexibility on all sides, we have a strong record of making successful projects and powerfully unlikely friendships.

A Selection of Past Community Projects

In ten years our residents have completed over 300 projects in the fifteen coastal communities that surround Casa Wabi. This selection of past projects show some of the range and scope of what is possible working with local schools, individuals, performing arts ensembles, professional associations, and other affinity groups.

Bestiario en chatino: plantas y animales de la Costa Chica de Oaxaca, México
Benjamín Torres and Claudia Fernández
Niño Artillero Primary School, San Isidro Llano Grande
October–November 2014

Mexican artists Claudia Fernández and Benjamín Torres worked with students from Niño Artillero Primary School in San Isidro Llano Grande to compile, illustrate, and publish a bestiary of plants and animals from the region in Chatino. Neither artist had previous experience with the language. Spoken by about 45,000 people in Oaxaca, Chatino was, until the creation of a documentation project in 2003, an oral language with no written form. The Bestiario project was developed with the assistance of a committee of five parents, two teachers, and the school principal Prof. Ramiro Jiménez, a native Chatino speaker.

The objective was to contribute to the ongoing revival of Chatino by integrating it into the imaginary of young Oaxacans. Therefore, the students used both Spanish and Chatino in their drawings. They ultimately produced a total of more than 100 drawings for use in their bestiary. The published book was given an official launch party and reading, attended by everyone involved in the project. The students, some of whose older relatives speak Chatino, but who themselevs do not, were presented with their author’s copies.

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Moon Race
Samuel Boutruche
Emiliano Zapata High School, Río Grande
May – June 2017

Boutruche and his collaborators from Emiliano Zapata High School created a 50m-long lunar surface race track on the beach at Roca Blanca, north of Casa Wabi. Using extensive research drawn from NASA surveys, the group mapped lunar features onto the beach at 1:1 scale, shaping the natural topography of the beach to simulate running across the surface of the moon.

The uncanny transformation was a great success. Among other things, it rendered the beach, which those who grow up on the coast tend to take for granted, entirely new. Sand proved to be a remarkable material for the projection of dreams: easy to shape on a fairly grand scale, but also entirely fluid and impermanent as a building material.

And for a day, heaven and earth connected.

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Mix-Tepec Dance
NOHBORDS (Diego Mur and Mauricio Rico) and Marcelo Ruano
House of Culture, Rio Grande and Piedra del Pacífico
June 2018

Diego Mur and Mauricio Rico of NOHBORDS contemporary dance project collaborated with twenty dancers (young and old) from the Folkloric dance group of the House of Culture in Rio Grande. The idea was to exchange their expertise in contemporary dance with the local dancers’ knowledge of traditional forms such as zapateo. Special emphasis was placed on sharing the details of their respective dance cultures, including warm-up and breathing techniques. They also experimented with blending their different approaches to movement.

The project took on a wonderful second life when Mur, Rico and fellow resident, Ecuadorean composer Marcelo Ruano, realized that they could combine their projects into something excitingly multi-disciplinary. Ruano came to Casa Wabi under the auspices of the music education organization Iberoquestas Juveniles. to work with Piedra del Pacífico, a local band, to develop new rights-free songs for their repertoire. Over eleven rehearsal sessions, Ruano performed improvisation exercises, composition, sound explorations and creation of sound environments for films or stories with the members of the band. (He also worked with music teachers in San Pedro Mixtepec to expand their pedagogy.) Piedra del Pacífico performed a number of new songs, including “Mix-Tepec” and “Trencito” at Casa Wabi and combined in a joint performance with the Folkloric dance group of the House of Culture of Rio Grande performing new choreography set to a third new song ”Viva San Pedro Mixtepec.”

Everyone involved benefited greatly from having to adapt their processes and expectations to the back-to-basics conditions that are a given on Oaxaca’s Costa Chica, where nature, as surely as any choreographer, establishes the conditions of creative expression—especially where the body is involved.

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Theater of Shadows
Fabiola Torres and Daniel Monroy
Filomeno Mata Primary School in San José Manialtepec
October–November 2020

The objective was to create a shadow theater (an important antecedent in the invention of cinema) for Filomeno Mata Primary School in San José Manialtepec. The idea was to use the sun to project a series of changing scenes on a flat surface every day. The sun is not just the source of all life, it is also the original film projector. Here we hoped to use it to tell stories based on basic principles of optics.

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Suspiros
Felix Blume
Melchor Ocampo Elementary School, Zapotalito
February–April 2022

Suspiros (Sighs) is an action that allowed children from the school of Zapotalito to make a call to the lagoon of the village. To do so, they sounded their clay ocarinas from a boat. As an answer, an aquatic installation—made of other ocarinas—sounded as the waves came through it, giving a voice to the water. This ephemeral dialogue is an invitation to listen to the lagoon and the ecological problems it faces.

The short video is the result of a workshop during various weeks, in which the pupils were introduced to listening, to drawing, to environmental issues and the work with clay, allowing them to build their own ocarina.

With Aldo, Ángel, Ángel Adolfo, Araceli, Axel, Cristal, Emanuel, Jhony, Julian, Marisol, Teresita, Yahel, Zuritzy, the teacher Viviana Gil Juárez y and Edmanuel Ambrosio principal from Melchor Ocampo de Zapotalito Elementary School.

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Saint Transvestite of the Coast
Rafaella Kennedy
Shaky Paz, Astrid Barranco, and Mística Olandra
October–November 2022

The project was an immersion in the coastal territory of Oaxaca, where, from her trans, indigenous, and Brazilian experience, Kennedy built an approach to transgender people in the region. Using a process of active listening and conversation, she worked with each of her subjects to produce a direction for the images she would produce, reflecting their identifications and desires.The purpose was to create a sense of belonging through photography, starting from their stories and communities, while also expanding their knowledge of the trans movement.

The trans community needs a positive social imaginary, which must be built. In the Americas Mexico has the second highest number of crimes against trans people. Brazil has the most; the United States the third most.) Society is being reconfigured. This statistic is one that demonstrates how wrenching the process can be. In her work, Kennedy builds a base of images and memories to help sustain her emerging community. Photography is her tool of choice for claiming trans people’s existence and presence, and for creating a set of standards of representation, gradually emerging from hiding in Puerto and beyond.

Kennedy describes this activiation and recognition of the local trans community as one step in history along the road to establishing a legacy that transcends violence and projects trans lives into Latin America.

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Recuerdos
Jorge Miño
Felipe Cruz, Rolando García, Ildefonso Aragón, Judith Canseco, and José Ramirez Reyes
October–November 2023

After interviewing workers in the region about their jobs in informal conversations, Miño decided to make a film about them. The people profiled in Tierra Adentro are potter Felipe Cruz, metalworker Rolando García, teacher Ildefonso Aragón, chef Judith Canseco, and construction worker José Ramirez Reyes. Miño immersed himself in their stories, tocuching on work, family, and regional events.

FACILITIES

Artists’s Bungalows

Accommodations for residents consist of six individual, freestanding bungalows. Each bungalow has a king size bed, a couch, a desk, a fan, a private patio (with lounge chair and direct access to the beach), and a full bathroom with a closet, a safe, and a shower. (Soap, shampoo, and conditioner are provided.) There is power in the bungalows but no WiFi.

Artists’s Studios

The studio spaces consist of six open air rooms with sinks that are designed for visual artists but can be used by anyone, and two more-enclosed studios with desks. Other spaces can be used by special arrangement as needed.

DAILY LIFE

The experience here is strongly empirical. Nature predominates. The sublimity can seem unremitting and often becomes a spiritual trial of sorts. The local environment is a product of the interaction between the Pacific Ocean, coastal mountains, and the subtropical climate. It is lush and severe, beautiful and harsh. Casa Wabi itself is separated into two worlds by Tadao Ando’s 312-meter-long wall—beach and water on one side, cultivated coastal plain and desert garden on the other.

Adapting to what the environment allows, most residents gradually find their balance between creative time and space, relationship building, and community engagement.

The Setting

Ando’s wall parallels the Pacific one hundred meters inland: separating public space from private. The huge palapa at the center of this wall is the heart of Casa Wabi’s sense of place. With its soaring interior proportions—beach shack meets gothic church—ever-spinning fans, and ample places to sit, talk, and eat, together or alone, it is a physical definition of community. The other living and working spaces radiate out on all sides. Everywhere, the sharp edges of thatch-topped concrete play geometry games with the sun—casting morphing yellow triangles and shady purple polygons against slices of blue sky.

The section of Pacific coastline where Casa Wabi sits is unprotected. There is no bay, just a beautiful strip of relatively private beach. Ours is not a surf beach. There is an undertow, the rip current can be strong, and the waves break hard on shore. Despite the proximity of an infinity of water, the feeling of the tenuousness of life in the desert is omnipresent. The prevailing shore breeze scours away at everything with fine sand, while offering a welcome respite from the heat. The continental shelf drops off abruptly just off shore here. The ocean goes quickly deep and cold. Whales make their annual commute close in to shore, watched by leatherback turtles that come to lay their eggs and an occasionally disoriented freshwater crocodile. Lines of brown pelicans hunt up and down the beach, skimming the break, falling elbows-first into the water.

As long as the sun is above the horizon, the heat is unrelenting on the garden side. The 27-hectare (67 acre) garden was cultivated from scratch and features an incredible diversity of flora and fauna. Nearly all of which seem armored with some kind of spine or barb. Lizards race from sunbeam to sunbeam through the heat of the day. Trees like the pochote with its green trunk and dark coat of thorns and the low, radial-armed guayacán with its tiny bright green leaves bristle with spiky intent. After dusk, ghost crabs dart between the surf and the safety of their burrows on the beach by the thousands. Choruses of frogs bark all night. And the ocean pounds away like a metronome.

The Main House

Life at Casa Wabi revolves around the common area in the large open air palapa at the center of the complex. It features a long refectory style table, a variety of lounge seating arrangements, a pingpong table, and access to the swimming pool and beach. Starlink WiFi is available in this area. Limited printing is also available on request.

Meals

Head chef Emilia “Emi” Matus Ruiz and her team serve three communal meals a day on the big table in the main palapa. Breakfasts consist of fruit, home-made granola, yogurt, and a daily hot option made to order (e.g eggs, quesadillas). Lunches and dinners feature traditional Oaxacan cuisine, with occasional international flourishes. There are no facilities for separate meals. Limited accommodations for special dietary restrictions are possible by request.

In 2024, resident Patricio Tejedo worked with Emi and the entire kitchen staff (Rosibel Carmona Torres, Patricia Yareli Quintas, Perla Anahí Naranjo, and Zaira Jazmín Cortésto) to publish a Casa Wabi cookbook, Cocinando con Emi. A complete PDF is linked below. The cookbook is available for sale at Casa Wabi in Mexico City and Oaxaca with procceds helping to fund Casa Wabi’s programs.

The Climate
The period between November and April is hot, fairly dry, and clear. The rest of the year, May to October, is hot and wet.

Temperature
The temperature varies little throughout the year, with highs in the 90s °F (30s °C), lows in the 70s °F (20s °C) and averages in the 80s °F (high 20s °C).

Precipitation (days of rain/month)
January: 1  |  February: 1  |  March: 1  |  April: 2  |  May: 7  |  June: 14  |  July: 14  |  August: 15  |  September: 15  |  October: 8  |  November: 1  |  December: 1

Disease
Zika Virus and Dengue Fever are endemic to Oaxaca and prevalent in the rainy season. The use of insect repellent is highly recommended, and repellant is available in an on-site store.