Unprepared Readiness

An international residency for embodied artistic research through improvisation and performance practice

Unprepared Readiness is centered on creative experimentation and performance research across artistic forms. The residency embraces improvisational realities as a guiding spirit, supporting embodied artistic inquiry and encouraging attention to both individual and collective processes of creation, performance-making, and sharing.

The project functions as an artistic research initiative, bringing artists together to explore how improvisation operates as both an artistic and lived process. From these states of inquiry, performances and other forms of artistic expression emerge that may be poetic, abstract, sensorial, reflective, or at times reveal a certain simplicity of being and existing.

While artists from different disciplines may be involved, each edition is intended to propose a distinct focus and working structure, shaping how improvisation is practiced, researched, and shared. Performance practice — and practice itself as performance — creates a space for artistic exchange and social inquiry, opening different ways of experiencing creativity, relation, and emergence.

Rather than working toward a fixed artistic outcome, the residency places value on the ongoing development of artistic practice, allowing research, encounters, experiments, and performances to influence how each artist continues their work within and beyond the residency.

The long-term impact lies in supporting artists’ practices dedicated to inquiry through improvisational states. 

The project relies on public funding in order to take place. In both 2025 and 2026, Unprepared Readiness has been supported by the Busan Cultural Foundation.