Open Call: What Stays – Archiving Care

>> Please find the German call here

The JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in cooperation with transmediale festival and the Goethe Institut Slovakia are pleased to announce What Stays - Archiving Care. The year-long project explores digital counter archives and the role of technology in opening up alternative histories and memories, and launches with an open call with three digital residencies for international artists from any discipline. Each three month residency will be awarded with €3,000 euros.

The deadline is May 4, 2021.

Challenging records, reclaiming narratives, or writing differences into public accounts, requires defiance, imagination, and the bringing together of oppositional experiences and knowledge. Often incomplete and unstable, archives have become spaces where accounts of histories are contested and expanded through acts of resistance and refusal. Examining the gaps, omissions, and the politics of metadata, What Stays - Archiving Care explores how counter-archives can be built through gestures of care, opening up  alternative histories, narratives, and stories.

Responding to changing political realities, the project explores how objects, landscapes, built environments, and bodies can be rethought, and asks:

• How  might counter archives be embodied differently and rethought through oral traditions, archival tools, and experimental digital practices?
• What tools and technologies, such as gaming platforms or artificial intelligence, account for more-than-human or unaccounted memories?
• What role does care and imagination play in spaces of resistance against official records and dominant narratives?
• How do artistic practices activate silence or omissions and refuse the politics of metadata and indexing?
• What role do more-than-human agents have in shaping new systems of knowledge and understandings of civilisation, culture, and nature?
• How might diy archives built on intimacy, instability and failure make visible new responsibilities and accountabilities?
• What are the values of the counter-archive and how do they transform or generate new political realities?
• How can the practices of archiving account for the alteration of landscape by climate change realities?
• How can counter-archives become living spaces of undoing, resignification, and repair?
• What role can archival practices take in the construction of new territorial imaginaries and identities?

What Stays - Archiving Care highlights artistic, speculative, and uncooperative practices that change perceptions of pasts and futures. Over the year the project partners will host events, workshops, discussions and performances as well as digital articles exploring and documenting the projects topic and outcomes.

Application

Applications to What Stays - Archiving Care are open from April 6 - May 4 (midnight CET)
The call is open to artists (working individually or in collectives) to submit new or ongoing projects who are working with digital technologies, counter histories and experimental archival formats. Each three month online residency is awarded €3,000 and will take place remotely between June - September 2021.The completed work will be presented online and residents will be invited to partake in an event in the year-long programme of the project partners.

Format

Applications to What Stays - Archiving Care are open to all web based formats including text, 3D objects, sound, performances, API’s and games, among others. We particularly welcome projects that follow the principles of open source, accessibility and participation.

Jury

• The artists for the three digital residencies will be selected by a joint jury of:
• Oulimata Gueye (curator and art critic)
• Clara Herrmann (Head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste)
• Markus Huber (Director, Goethe-Institute Slovakia)
• Nora O Murchú (Artistic Director, transmediale festival)
• Helen Pritchard (Associate Professor in Queer Feminist Technoscience and Digital Design, University of Plymouth)

Apply

Applications are submitted online and should include:

• A project proposal (500 - 750 words)
• Project image or video
• Timeline
• Proposed methodology
• Short Bio
• Contact Information
• A portfolio (PDF) of previous work

For further information and questions please contact: info@transmediale.de