Transhumances
PHILIA's Transhumances residencies invite artists to work locally, with local materials, for a local exhibition. The artists take up residency in various locations, exploring and experimenting with the chosen region's natural materials and resources, ultimately resulting in a local exhibition.
Transhumances provide artists with opportunities to create collaboratively, interact with nature and new environments, and connect with local audiences while striving to achieve sustainable design.
Transhumances I
The inaugural edition brought artists to Le Sauvan, a historic Provençal estate in the Haute Provence region of southern France, where the landscape of dry stone, wild herbs, and limestone plateaus became both studio and subject.
Surrounded by the garrigue — the aromatic scrubland unique to Mediterranean France — resident artists were invited to harvest, transform, and sculpt using only the materials the land offered. Limestone, local clay, and Provençal oak were processed on site, giving rise to works whose form and texture are inseparable from their origin. The resulting exhibition was presented locally, allowing the region's communities to witness their own landscape reflected in contemporary collectible design.
"What happens to design when the land itself becomes both material and collaborator?"
Transhumances II
The second edition relocated the residency to Florence, Italy — a city whose very stones carry centuries of craft memory. Artists worked within the Florentine artisanal tradition, using materials native to Tuscany to create new works for a local exhibition.
Resident artists engaged directly with Florentine master craftspeople, exploring pietra serena — the grey sandstone that defines the city's Renaissance architecture — alongside hand-thrown terracotta and naturally woven linen from the Tuscan plains. The dialogue between historical technique and contemporary design sensibility produced works that felt simultaneously ancient and urgently present. The exhibition was staged within Florence itself, continuing the Transhumances principle that each work must find its first audience in the place that gave it form.
"Can the weight of a city's material history liberate a designer rather than constrain them?"
Transhumances III
The third edition took the residency to Cappadocia, Turkey — a landscape sculpted over millennia by volcanic eruption and wind erosion, where the earth itself is a record of geological time.
Working among the fairy chimneys and cave dwellings of Göreme, resident artists engaged with volcanic tuff — the soft, porous stone that Cappadocian communities have carved for shelter and storage for thousands of years. Obsidian fragments sourced from the volcanic plains and hand-shaped Anatolian clay formed the material palette. The extreme landscape — simultaneously lunar and profoundly inhabited — pushed designers to question the very boundary between natural formation and human making. The resulting exhibition was presented in Cappadocia, offering local communities an encounter with their own geological inheritance reimagined as collectible design.
"Where does the landscape end and the designed object begin when both are shaped by the same ancient force?"
