Aligned with the ethos of the art center, the residency program encourages research-based, eclectic practices, while granting a new form of visibility to the otherwise hidden processes. The 8th floor consists of several shared studios of varied functions and disciplines, designed to promote cross-disciplinary experimentation. Conceived as visible sites—with transparent walls and semi-open to the public—they foster spontaneous social contact and dialogue, functioning as a public platform or an interface rather than traditional private spaces for art production.

Within these contexts, we imagine the Y Contemporary Art Center itself as a cultural project—one that through eclectic contemporary practices, maps vanishing traces of the region’s long history of cultural encounter, early maritime trade, colonial entanglement, trajectories of emigration, its industrial and urban transformations, whose afterlives, sedimented in contemporary social and economic textures, continue to shape our present reality. Rather than cataloguing histories, it invites artists to use the site and its overlapping temporalities as a palimpsest through which to rethink contemporary art and its role in shaping new understandings of entangled social, cultural, and historical realities.