The Magnetic Residencies artistic committee met on July 7, 2026, and selected artist Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin for a residency at Bétonsalon as part of the 5th edition of this program. Bétonsalon will host Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin in residence for three months, from April to early July 2026. She will receive a monthly grant of €2,500, benefit from a studio-apartment at the Cité Internationale des Arts as part of the Institut Français x Cité Internationale des Arts program, receive curatorial support from the Bétonsalon team, as well as networking opportunities with art professionals to develop his research.

Residency Project

Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin’s research will centre on the potential of renewable energy and other digital technologies to be re-envisioned as tools for repair, relation and cultural memory within urban Caribbean diasporic contexts. Attentive to wider structural inequalities, the project explores personal and collective practices of renewal and transformation in the context of climate and health inequities. The enquiry is shaped via a lens of relation, taking into consideration the shared and distinct colonial legacies that connect the UK and France. 

Involving sun, air and other elemental energy, she is interested in how digital technologies might be utilised with gentleness, vibrancy and sensitivity. Working poetically across research and installation, she aims to translate invisible digital systems into tactile and sensorial forms that explore the intersections of identity, ecology and technological mediation. 

During the residency, she will inform her enquiry by engaging with institutions such as the Centre for Earth Politics at Université Paris Cité and CIRESC (Centre international de recherches sur les esclavages et post-esclavages). In parallel, she will draw on living rhythmic practices, including movement and sound, as forms of embodied knowledge. She will be guided by an interdisciplinary practice that approaches physical interventions as archive, cultivating space for reflection and exchange.