Further Afield: John Costi’s 2026 Residency at Lagamas
- TCAF
- Jul 20
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 28
In August 2026, The Cornelius Arts Foundation will welcome London-based artist John Costi to Lagamas, in southern France, for a new field residency exploring how artistic practice can transform rupture into renewed movement.
What does an artist need when the purpose is not simply to produce another body of work, but to allow the practice itself to move?
A residency offers time, space, materials and distance from everyday demands. These conditions matter. Yet the deeper work often takes place elsewhere: in the artist’s capacity to return to experience without becoming trapped within it; to recognise what has persisted; and to find new forms through which meaning, agency and direction can emerge.
This question sits at the heart of John Costi’s forthcoming residency at Lagamas, provisionally titled Further Afield. Taking place in August 2026, the residency is hosted under The Cornelius Arts Foundation’s Ginkgo lab. research programme and co-developed with RIZOM.
RIZOM grew out of TCAF and Ginkgo lab.’s long-term research into how artistic and symbolic processes can support human development, meaning-making and agency. Now developed as an independent technology and research venture, RIZOM creates privacy-preserving tools that help individuals and organisations make sense of lived experience without handing the interpretation of that experience over to artificial intelligence. Within the residency, TCAF provides the artistic and curatorial framework, while RIZOM contributes research methods and instruments designed to observe how meaning, orientation and creative agency evolve through the artistic process.
A practice shaped through transformation
John Costi is a London-based artist whose work moves between sculpture, installation, painting, performance, spoken word and social participation. Drawing on his Cypriot and Irish heritage and his experience of growing up in London, he works with found objects, personal archives and existing cultural material, often through improvisation, assemblage and chance. He describes this process of bringing disparate materials and histories into relation as “Culture-Mating”.
At the centre of his practice lies a sustained concern with healing and transformation. His work creates environments in which personal experience can become shared material without losing its specificity. It also unsettles the usual division between artist and audience, inviting participation, conversation and collective authorship.
Costi’s work does not aestheticise trauma or present it as a closed narrative. It returns to difficult material, reframes it and gives it symbolic form through collage, staging, performance and remixing. The same memories, objects and motifs may reappear, but they do not necessarily return in the same configuration.
This is where repetition can become transformation. A downward spiral repeats by narrowing possibility. Artistic practice can interrupt that movement. Through the work, the artist may return to what has happened while altering the frame through which it is encountered. What was once experienced only as rupture may become material, relation, image, rhythm or form.
As Costi enters this next stage of his practice, he has expressed a readiness to seek anew and create beauty. Further Afield will create the conditions in which that passage can be explored with care, freedom and depth.
A different rhythm and light
Lagamas lies in the Hérault valley, within the Languedoc region of southern France. Its agricultural landscape, historical depth and sensory character offer a markedly different environment from the urban settings in which much of Costi’s work has developed.
The residency is neither intended as an escape from the artist’s existing practice, nor as a demand that he leave its history behind. It offers a displacement through which familiar material may be approached differently: under another quality of light, within another rhythm, and through encounters with unfamiliar textures, spaces and forms.
Distance can make an archive newly visible. Slowness may reveal connections that urgency obscures. A change of environment can also affect the body before it changes the work: altering attention, pace, sensory awareness and the threshold at which something previously overlooked becomes perceptible.
The residency will therefore remain open to what the place itself introduces. Its valued by the movements that become possible within the practice.
The residency as a field of research
Since its inception, TCAF has approached residencies as more than mechanisms for artistic production. They form part of the Foundation’s research and development ground: places in which artistic practice can generate methods, knowledge and forms of transformation capable of travelling beyond a single project.
In 2017, TCAF’s residency The Strings that Connect a Village brought photographer Gideon Mendel, tintype specialist Jonathan Pierredon and artist Alice Mann into Lagamas. Through portraiture, personal objects, handwritten narratives, filmed conversations and a collective mapping exercise, the project explored the relationships through which a rural community constructs its identity. Forty-five portraits were connected by coloured threads representing familial, professional, associative, friendship and neighbourhood ties, creating a living cartography of the village’s social fabric.
The 2026 residency returns to Lagamas with a different scale and focus. Where the earlier project examined the relational fabric of a community, Further Afield will consider transformation within an individual artistic practice and the wider symbolic field that the practice creates.
The artist will not be treated as a clinical subject, and the work will not be reduced to evidence of a predetermined therapeutic outcome. The purpose is to accompany and document the creative process without appropriating its meaning.
TCAF’s research protocols will attend to the relationship between environment, process, artistic output and the practitioner’s own account of change. The artist remains the primary author and interpreter of what the work signifies.
Following the movement of meaning
RIZOM will contribute two instruments drawn from its research into symbolic intelligence.
The Basho Loop™ follows the movement between lived experience, symbolic expression and return. Rather than asking a system to interpret experience on a person’s behalf, it creates a structure through which images, metaphors and recurring motifs can be revisited, altered or rejected by their human author. Meaning circulates back to the person from whom it originates.
Metanoia™ will support the documentation of threshold moments: points at which an existing frame no longer holds, a different relation becomes perceptible, or the practitioner recovers the agency to move in a new direction.
Together, these approaches will help trace what RIZOM describes as constructive recursion: not the repetition of the same pattern, but a return through which the symbolic field reorganises itself and generates renewed coherence.
The instruments aim to serve the practice, not the reverse. They offer ways of noticing change that might otherwise remain invisible: a motif that acquires another function, a material encountered differently, an old object placed within a new relation, or a moment when the artist recognises that the work has changed its direction.
Making room for what may emerge
Supporting an artist means more than supporting production.
It means considering what allows a practice to hold, deepen and renew itself, particularly when that practice has been formed through disruption. Funding, space, fabrication and visibility can each be decisive. Yet they do not, on their own, explain how an artist moves from survival towards renewed authorship.
That passage depends upon less visible capacities: consciousness, agency, meaning and orientation.
Further Afield will make room for those capacities to become active within the work. It begins without prescribing its destination. Its provisional title already suggests movement beyond a known perimeter: not a rejection of what came before, but an expansion of the field within which it can be understood.
Lagamas offers a place of serene light and altered rhythm. John Costi brings a practice capable of turning fragments, memories and ruptures into living symbolic form. The residency will begin where those two fields meet.
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