A recent residency opportunity, The International Fellowship Programme, has been launched at the Visiting Arts Office of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as part of the UK's Year of the Artist 2000 Visiting Arts forwards cultural awareness and cultural relations with the UK by the agency of the use of international art and cultural links. The first residency will be a partnership with Spike Island in Bristol with a focus upon the Balkans and the southward Eastern Europe region--including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro--for the first year.