Short Description
This year’s Open Call invites artist-researchers to explore alternative perspectives that embrace fluidity, transformation and multiplicity. How can we understand the human, for example, as a something fluid and constantly being reimagined? How can we think about identities in flux, bodies and selves that resist definition, and on the generative potential of becoming rather than being? We encourage research into the porousness of borders, which ventures beyond the edge of the map to see if the monsters really dwell there.
Loosely inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s shape-shifters—those who move in the in-between, those who adapt, cross borders, and embody multiplicities—we are especially interested in contributions that dive into the uncanny, the monstrous, the ever-changing.
Finally, in the spirit of experimenting with the unknown, this year APRIA welcomes all sorts of collaborative and collective projects, including with AI, as long as its co-authorship is ethical and clearly acknowledged and explained. At the same time, we want to stress that we value the imperfect and unpolished aspects of human-made art, writing and research; those elements that often carve space for the slippery and the messy, for what sits on the edge of becoming, even in spite of itself.
The following questions underpin this call:
- In which spaces, times, relations, and discourses can we encounter bodies of monstrosity?
- What is the distance between me and the Otherness?
- How can we redefine borders, extend reality beyond the ‘possible,’ and unsettle narratives?
How are borders in sound defined? What and where is the monstrous in them? How do we embody and how do we perform the monstrous?
Keywords
Unruly bodies, monstrosity, Otherness, hybrid bodies, technosphere, cyborg, morphogenesis
Eligibility
APRIA invites submissions from both individual artists and collectives. All submissions must include a completed application form, which is available for download below.
The platform offers contributors the possibility to publish their work in varied formats. Research may be published as a text, an image essay, a film, or a sound contribution. Text-based submissions must not exceed 5,000 words. For contributions in audio or image formats, an explanatory text of between 50 and 300 words is required. Written contributions are accepted in either Dutch or English.
All submissions will be subject to a process of selection and assessment by the APRIA Platform’s Advisory Board. The board will evaluate contributions based on their relevance to the call’s theme, their affiliation with the APRIA statement, and the criteria of engagement, accessibility, and originality.
How to Apply
Send your submission to contactapria@artez.nl
Program Benefits & Awards
Your contribution will be reviewed by our Advisory Board.
Selected contributions will be professionally edited and published on APRIA.
APRIA contributions will also be disseminated within the ArtEZ Research Centre networks.
Entry Fee
None
Location
Arnhem, Netherlands
Timeline
- Application Deadline: 12 January 2026
Website Link: https://apria.artez.nl/
