Residencies
July 6, 2026

Resident Artists, Centro Pecci - SUPERTOSCANA

The Siena Art Institute is one of the partners of SUPERTOSCANA, a new artist residency program promoted by Centro Pecci, designed for young artists and curators under the age of 36. The project offers twenty residency grants, divided into two seven month cycles, offering participants the opportunity to engage in research, professional development, and artistic production across a range of cultural contexts throughout Tuscany.

Both residency cycles explore important themes in contemporary debate, including ecological sustainability, the relation between art, place and local communities, and the role of civic participation. Through a series of cultural institutions and organizations active across Tuscany, participants are invited to use their artistic practice as a way of engaging with the changing landscape and the communities that inhabit it.

SART participates in the first residency cycle, running from April to November 2026. The program focuses on the relationship between the environment and the urban landscape, encouraging participants to reflect on ongoing transformations and their ecological, social and political implications. SART offers the selected young artists and curators a dedicated studio as a space for working, developing ideas, and creative production, while also becoming part of an open and collaborative environment that fosters dialogue, research and experimentation. During their time at SART, residents have the opportunity to engage with local people and take part in the Institute’s activities, creating an ongoing exchange between artistic practices and the local environmental, and cultural realities of the surrounding community. The three-month residency hosted by each partner organization will allow participants to develop their own project while advancing their individual research.

The artists and curators selected for the first residency cycle, hosted by the Siena Art Institute:

Peng Shuai Paolo (彭帅) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Xiangtan, China, who moved to Italy in 2004. His diverse cultural backgrounds make the discussion of contradictions and possibilities of coexistence one of the themes of his work. The confusion, exploration, and reinterpretation of identity, together with a reflection on the relation between self, body and soul constitute his way of writing his personal history.
His work is situated within a field of research defined as Economadism understood as the study of environmental conditions and therefore cultural, anthropological and psychological nomadic states of the human subject considered, according to the theory of philosopher Rosi Braidotti, as “in transit from a unitary dimension, homogenous and controllable to a fluid one, in evolution and hybrid.” To address this issue, Paolo Peng Shuai refers to the world of Chinese plants, symbol of the identity of his native country.

Gaia De Megni is a visual artist originally from Santa Margherita Ligure, who lives and works between Milan and Rome. She studied Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at the NABA Academy in Milan, furthering her studies with the MAP-PA Master in Performing Arts organized by Palaexpo and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Since 2014 she has worked with different media including sculpture, video and performance. Her work analyzes the possibilities of an image, through the fragmentation of Western imagery and its representations, mainly referring to moving images (the cinematic and digital archive) looking at individual and collective matrices. In her artistic production there is a constant interest in the possibility of finding a balance between monument and movement, between solid and liquid.

Giulia Menegale is an independent curator and researcher based in Venice and London. She studied Multimedia Arts at IUAV and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has collaborated as a curatorial, editorial, and research assistant with Looking Forward C.I.C. (London), Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Art (Turin), Island Gallery (Brussels), and Taryn Simon Projects (NY). She has participated in various residency programmes and curatorial courses. She has curated and co-curated public programmes, group exhibitions, and workshops involving international emerging artists and researchers, receiving public and private support, including from Arts Council England and the Goldsmiths’ Friend Fund. Her research interests include museum studies, decolonial theories, and feminist theories.

Rebeca Pak is a visual artist based in Milan. Her work reflects the traces of an existence in transit, blending and recombining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, Pak’s work creates open contexts with the aim of enabling confrontation and dialogue. The artist works with multiple media, using her family archive — which includes photographs, traditional Korean furniture, and inherited paintings — as well as various elements of her daily life, such as fabric, food, language, and architecture. Her works have been presented at Standards (Milan), Rehearsal Project Space (Milan), Ateliê 397 (São Paulo), 2nd Šiluva Art Biennial (Lithuania), HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), The Clemente (New York), Galleria Eugenia Delfini (Rome), CAMPO XS (Genoa) and Platea Palazzo Galeano (Lodi). Pak collaborated with Archive, Berlin/Milan, between 2020 and 2022.

The SUPERTOSCANA project is developed in collaboration with different organisations across the Tuscan region: Archivio Vittorio Giorgini – Ba.Co., Baratti; Casa Masaccio centro per l’arte contemporanea, Comune di San Giovanni Valdarno; Fondazione Magazzini Generali, Livorno; mudaC | museo delle arti Carrara, Comune di Carrara; e Siena Art Institute, Siena. The project was conceived and developed with the support of Co-design Toscana and made possible thanks to funding from the Tuscany Region, through the ESF 2021–2027 program supporting employment in the cultural heritage and contemporary art sectors.