Opportunity for Speculative Futures Artists of all disciplines
Manufactured Ecosystems
Submission Deadline: April 15, 2024
Are you concerned about our climate?
Do you make speculative futures?
Do you wonder how humans will adapt?
Are you passionate about collaboration?
Join our transdisciplinary team at Manufactured Ecosystems!
Includes stipends for materials and artist fees.
The transdisciplinary team at Manufactured Ecosystems invites artists to submit proposals for art, performance, or practice-based research projects for an exhibition at the University of Guelph’s Zavitz Gallery at the School of Fine Art and Music (June 1 – August 15, 2025). Manufactured Ecosystems is an international project that explores the potential for nature-based knowledge, techno-knowledge, and imagined knowledge to forecast the future of climate adaptation.
Project Requirements
As part of the project, we are developing a physical and online exhibition and an anthology of original fiction featuring digital reproductions of artworks that will emerge from two collaborative arts/science workshops (tentatively June and August, 2024). Selected artists will receive remuneration for attending, and contributing to these workshops that will explore real and imagined climate adaptation technologies.
This project is committed to dismantling barriers to equity, diversity, and inclusion and providing opportunities to equity-deserving groups.
Selected artists will identify one ecosystem service as their subject and will explore the technologies associated with achieving life-sustaining functions. The selected ecosystem services identified for this project are:
- Biodiversity: a diverse reservoir of strategies and information
- Pollination: a distribution system for the purpose of plant reproduction
- Cultural Services and Human Experience: the components of the human species derived from emersion in the natural world
- Soil formation: the creation of new soil
- Photosynthesis: the creation of sugars from sunlight
- Climate regulation: the stabilizing of climatic conditions
Applicants will be asked to rank their preferences in the application form at our Call for Artists website.
Eligibility
This project is based in Canada but is open to international applications.
Manufactured Ecosystems welcomes submissions from artists of all identities (e.g. racialized, Indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ, neurodivergent). If you are comfortable, we encourage artists to indicate their intersections in the application. Disclosure is not a requirement to submit, and we recognize that not all people are safe to disclose their identities.
Compensation
Selected artists will also be provided with a materials stipend, curatorial support, installation assistance, insurance, and artist fees in accordance with CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens) guidelines.
Selection Process
Up to six artists will be selected as Collaborators. Applications will be reviewed by the Manufactured Ecosystems Art Selection Committee. Applicants will be contacted with news of the committee’s decision in mid-May.
Submission Requirements
Proposals are due on April 15, 2024 and must include:
- Artist statement – 250 words maximum, (one (1) page, size 12 font);
- Résumé/CV (one (1) page, size 12 font);
- Art portfolio: a selection of five (5) examples of your work.
How to Submit
Learn more about the project and complete the application form at www.manufacturedecosystems.com/art-apply
Submission Deadline: April 15, 2024
For additional information or questions, please contact:
Shoshanah Jacobs at [email protected]
