Why?

How can artistic practice help us imagine a future in which no community, landscape, or artist is treated as expendable?

Encompass Art seeks support for ATTUNE: Exploring Artistic Connections in Rural Environments, a research residency at Bellamont Wildlife Conservancy in County Cavan, Ireland, and The Sacrifice Zone, a participatory performance emerging from this research.

The Need

Environmental harm is unevenly distributed. Some communities and landscapes bear the costs of decisions made elsewhere. Rural places can also be treated as cultural backdrops, without lasting relationships or responsibility. Meanwhile, artists addressing urgent social and ecological issues often face insecure employment, unpaid labour, and burnout.

Sustainable artistic practice requires care for artists, communities, and the environments in which work takes place.

The Solution

ATTUNE explores how residencies can foster sustainable creative practice through care, reciprocity, and meaningful engagement with place. At Bellamont, artists undertake site-responsive activities, including sound walks, active listening, and reflection, investigating how artistic work can become more socially, professionally, and environmentally sustainable.

The Sacrifice Zone translates these questions into a public artwork connecting ecological justice, local knowledge, and artistic imagination.

How

Planned for Bellamont in autumn 2027, the performance brings together dancers, musicians, visual artists, performers, videographers, and sound artists in six movements: Creating the Sacrifice Zone, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Leave No Trace.

Through the symbolic transformation or surrender of artworks, the performance explores what we must relinquish, what we must protect, and what can be restored. Contributions from local communities and conservation organisations will help shape the work. Production methods