CasaPoli (Bío Bío region, southern Chile) will develop from March through December of this year a series of creative residencies titled Context and Territory, directed by local cultural managers Lesley Fernández and Óscar Concha. The program will include visits by key national and international artists from the contemporary art scene along with young talents from the area. CasaPoli is a cultural center open since 2005 in Coliumo, a small cove populated by fishermen located more than 40 kilometers north of Concepción, the regional capital and the third largest city in Chile. It is a place with a very singular art scene, still very small but becoming increasingly known through international connections and proposals that are bound to the context of the community in which is created, to auto-suggestive practices that are somehow responsible for the decentralization of the national artistic scene and for putting the area in the map of a particular Latin American art circuit. From the edge of a cliff, facing an imposing landscape that opens to the ocean, CasaPoli boasts an architecture that is internationally praised. The enormous concrete cube is an open space for artists and cultural producers to develop residency projects. Several prominent artists have been here, including Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Leonardo Herrera (Colombia), Christians Luna (Peru) and Fernando Prats, Enrique Zamudio and Nury González (Chile). The creative strategy proposed challenges artists to commit to a working process that establishes relationships with the environment, as the surrounding nature and the social and cultural context in nearby communities—like Coliumo, Tomé, Dichato and Concepción—become very interesting. The 2014 program began in March with the participation of Juan Castillo (1952), a prominent Chilean artist internationally recognized. Castillo lives in Sweden and was a member of CADA, or Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, an emblematic art group during the dictatorship. With an artistic production that expands over 40 years, the author often combines mediums—video, photography, painting and in situ installations—as he always maintains a connection with the contexts in which his work is inserted. The work he developed in Coliumo gravitated towards introspection, drawing, painting and writing, as his encounters with cultural agents from the area became essential; as was a new take on his intervention series titled Passage Rites, in which he burned in front of the ocean and under the setting sun that phrase—written with large letters—that gradually vanished and left an ephemeral, totally volatile, sign in its place. The residency program continues until December with the participation of other guest artists: Rainer Krause (Chile-Germany), an important representative of sound art in Chile, and a cook and engraver; Dagmara Wyskiel, who heads the Se Vende Collective in Antofagasta; and Simón Wunderlich (Germany) who approaches the places experimentally. Four emerging regional artists will also be selected after reviewing their portfolios. In addition, the program will also include the participation of art theoreticians Ignacio Szmulewicz and David Romero.