Bjorn Calleja on His First Art Residency Experience at Port Tonic Art Center

Artist Bjorn Calleja speaks with Vogue Philippines about his work in Port Tonic Art Center’s summer exhibition, Vision Salée, and the month he spent at Port Tonic.

The lush shrubs of deep purple bougainvillea framing the Mediterranean’s turquoise waters make it difficult, at first, to imagine that Port Tonic Art Center once bustled with workers and the clanging of metal. A stroll along the waterfront, however, reveals the weathered concrete slabs of the old wharf and a jutting pier that must have once served as a jetty. The unmistakable man-made additions to the shoreline make sense with the discovery of  the center’s history as an old shipyard.

Built in the 1960s to also provide housing for workers, the compound’s architecture drew inspiration from Le Corbusier. Then also called Port Tonic, the shipyard belonged to the family of art collector Paolo Scarani. Operations wound down in 2005. In the years that followed, Scarani and his life partner, Xavier Sautier Magnan, also an avid art collector, set out to create a platform to get to know young artists and support their art practices.  To them, it felt like a natural step to reimagine the old shipyard as an artist residency.

This year marks a decade since they transformed Port Tonic into a venue for incubating and experimenting with art. They host the artists residencies in the lead up to summer. In July, Art Tonic, the culminating exhibition of resident artists, takes place. For the rest of the year, its wide spaces, views of the water, and proximity to St. Tropez make it a popular venue for private events.  

Bjorn Calleja, one of this year’s resident artists, has spent a month at Port Tonic. The studio, shared by the artists, occupies a separate structure, a cavernous hall with double-height wooden doors. Each morning, he swings these doors open to let the sunshine flood in. “I have my coffee and start painting early,” he says. “We get to explore the area in the afternoons, and that’s always an adventure. There are days when we go visit museums in the Côte d’Azur: the Fondation Maeght, the Hartung Bergman and Venet Foundations. Some days we go to the local public beach to swim and hang out.”

Since 2019, Lilia Di Bella, who teaches at the MFA Visual Arts program at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, has been curating the summer exhibitions. “This year, we are presenting the exhibition Vision Salée featuring six artists: Bjorn Calleja, Luca Martini, Cheng Sheng, Damini Yadav, Kim Lim, and Maria Duque. Over the years, we’ve worked on shows such as Still Waiving, with Ukrainian artists Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko, Yuri Pikull, and Pavel Rtue, and more recently L’écho des nouveaux mondes (2024), featuring Filipino artists Arvin Nogueras and Jigger Cruz, alongside Fabro Trancida from Buenos Aires.”

Both Calleja and Di Bella speak of the enriching experience that the exchange among artists provides, and how the networks developed during the summer program prove invaluable for the honing of both concepts and skills. “One of the distinctive features of this residency is its ability to foster connections between artists from different parts of the world, offering a space for experimentation and creative risk-taking,” observes Di Bella.

“This is the first art residency I have done, so everything about it is new for me,” shares Calleja. “I arrived on the last leg of some of the artists’ stays, but I was still able to learn about their respective practices and cultures. The environment is really different, the sun goes down at nine pm so the days are long, which gives me an opportunity to squeeze in a lot more studio time. The days also include watching other artists work and having conversations on what they do, and doing a few collaborative pieces. The best conversations happen at dinner, where we cook our respective cuisines for each other. We’ve made adobo! This is also when we get to know each other on a personal level.”

The Port Tonic residency program has also spurred a reciprocal relationship with a similar program in the Philippines, the Siargao Artiste in Residence (IAOAIR), led by Alelee Andanar and Ian Giron. Di Bella has taken part in this too.  “I had the opportunity to experience contemporary art in the Philippines firsthand. Several artists who have also participated in Port Tonic have taken part in the Siargao residency as well, contributing to a rich and ongoing exchange across artistic networks.”

The title of this year’s exhibition, Vision Salée, translates literally to “salty vision,” a response to the founders’ desire for the artists to be inspired by the place, its singular location close to nature and the sea. Di Bella notes that the exhibition “invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a universe where light blends with saline matter, where transparency coexists with opacity, and every canvas becomes a sensitive landscape suspended between clarity and mystery.”

On Calleja’s work, Di Bella reflects, “The theme of vision, with those eyes that probably represent our eyes of the future, immerses us in a mysterious and grotesque space, placing the act of seeing at the forefront. His undeniable painterly skill leads us into borderline worlds where multiple layers of narrative overlap; as he says, these are creations of liminal spaces.”

Calleja completed a total of 15 paintings, nine works on canvas, and six on paper. “The residency taught me to find ways to work outside my comfort zone, to be inspired by the beauty of the surrounding environment, and the diversity of cultures, but to remain honest and genuine to my visual language.”

The Vision Salée exhibition will run until September 30, 2025 at the Port Tonic Art Center, Roquebrune-sur-Argens, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France.