Residency
D’Puglia Residency
An exchange program invigorating the artistic development of local and international artists, designers, artisans by combining Puglia's inspirational heritage and landscape with the cosmopolitan multicultural international scenes.
Providing a unique and enriching experience for artists, fostering cross-cultural collaboration and artistic growth.
D’Puglia x DSCENE Residency — Go Where the Wind Takes You
In May, D’Puglia and DSCENE Magazine hosted an international group of artists in Castro, a cliffside town on Puglia’s Adriatic coast. The residency, Go Where the Wind Takes You, invited artists to immerse themselves in the rhythms, landscapes, and communities of Southern Italy—responding to the region through photography, drawing, writing, and installation.
The experience will culminate in Puglia, Unframed, a limited-edition volume and global exhibition debuting during Art Basel Miami in December. Far from a conventional guide, it offers an emotional and visual mapping of Puglia through the eyes of artists who arrived without an itinerary, letting the wind—and the place—shape their work.
From Lecce’s baroque streets to Otranto’s limestone bluffs, the artists engaged with local families, farmers, poets, and fishermen, embracing a slower rhythm of life and creative exchange. The residency’s influence will continue through exhibitions in New York, Paris, Belgrade, and Milan, extending its dialogue between place, memory, and artistic practice.
Through collaborations with partners D’Puglia carried the spirit of the residency beyond the peninsula, spotlighting the urgency of protecting Puglia’s ancient olive trees while weaving together culture, storytelling, and sustainability.
The residency reveals moments of connection, reflection, and creativity—an invitation to experience Puglia not as a destination, but as a dialogue.
D’Puglia inaugural residency program with Peter Matthews…
“Immersion with the ocean and nature is central to my practice, as is the notion and experience of the journey. I do not work in a studio. My work straddles the performative and the conceptual, the experimental and process and material-based inquiries into how I experience time, place, space, the sublime, the ineffable, the transient, the impermanent, the romantic, the mysterious, and the poetic.”
“I work directly with the mystical elements, dimensions, and truths that shape and inform our experience and understanding of who and where we are in the universe. I work across different ways of image-making and continuously discover that a drawing can take me to places that a painting cannot, while similarly, video may be more susceptible to capturing something that drawing, even after hours and hours drifting in the ocean, may elude.
My process of working in solitude in the ocean is defined and informed by the poetic blending of rituals, dreams, the spirit world, chanting, intuition, superstition, the paranormal, and the diversity of fringe and earth sciences while moving and responding to what is happening in our contemporary world.”
- Peter Matthews
