Hospitalfield Interdisciplinary Residency

Residency

Hospitalfield, Arbroath, Scotland

Artist: Ayda Pakzad Afshar

3–16 August 2026

Overview

In August 2026, I took part in Hospitalfield’s Interdisciplinary Residency in Arbroath, Scotland, where I spent two weeks developing a new stage of my ongoing project, The Coveration of Eve.

The residency became the starting point for Refusal to Remain Visible, an investigation into leaving as an act of choice and refusal. Working through visual notebooks, collage, image-based research, spatial experiments and an evolving studio wall, I followed the research from questions of leaving and agency towards role, frame, threshold, visibility, and eventually absence and archive.

Explore Refusal to Remain Visible

Over the two weeks, the studio became a space for thinking through making. The research wall grew gradually as questions, images, fragments and experiments were added, moved and removed.

Rather than arriving with a fixed outcome, I used the residency to let one question lead to another. What began with What if Eve chose to leave? eventually arrived at a different question: What happens to the story of a body after it has gone?

During the Residency

Research Presentation

Towards the end of the residency, I shared the developing research with the other residents and the Hospitalfield team through an informal presentation around the studio wall, tracing the questions and visual experiments that had shaped the work over the two weeks.

Reflection

I thought I would be thinking about absence, but instead I found myself staying with the moment before leaving. What does the body encounter when it tries to leave? An edge, a border, a threshold? At some point another question appeared on my wall: can a decision create a threshold? And that question has stayed with me.

Then the frame started to become something more than the edge of the image, something the body carries, crosses, or perhaps never completely leaves.

Reflection written during the residency, August 2026