Onassis AiR 2021/22 open call

Onassis AiR, the (inter)national artistic research residency program in Athens (Greece), invites artists, curators, designers, activists, collectives, educators, legal advocates, performance makers, economists, architects, filmmakers and other practitioners from any medium of expression or discipline to apply for the second iteration of The School of Infinite Rehearsals: Movements V–VIII, running between September 2021 and June 2022.

Governance: On Self-Organization & Institutions
Movement V: Self-Organization
September 6–October 24, 2021

Movement VI: Institutions
November 1–December 19, 2021

Economies: On Community Economies & Philanthropy
Movement VII: Community Economies
February 28–April 17, 2022

Movement VIII: Philanthropy
May 2–June 19, 2022

Conceived as a collective research program, The School of Infinite Rehearsals brings together an interdisciplinary group of participants to exchange knowledges and practices around two research topics that we find urgent to address today.

For our second year, we will look inwardly and also outwardly, for the spatial and temporal structures that affect the ways we live, act and come together. How do we relate to others and how do we organize our decisions? What modes of governance do we adhere to and how do we shape them? What economic systems do we choose to be complicit in and how much agency do we claim to implement radical alternatives? How do we institute our knowledge(s) and acknowledge our institutional complacency or complicity?

In fall 2021, Movement V & VI will collectively explore issues of governance, delving into self-organization (Movement V) and institutions (Movement VI).

In spring 2022, Movement VII & VIII will tackle areas of economies, with a focus on community economies (Movement VII) and philanthropy (Movement VIII).

Onassis AiR is not looking for answers, but rather for questions, intricacies, aspirations, intuitive strategies that need to be tested, and for ways to imagine other modes of functioning as societies. In conversation with our current participants, we are transforming to further expand and foster our collective and horizontal ways of thinking and practicing together. For this reason, there will be no conveners or mentors. The 2021/22 Movement Groups (V-VIII) will be convened by the participants themselves, who will co-shape the curriculum according to their proposed individual research interests.

The selection for the Onassis AiR 2021/22 open call will be done in two phases. Phase I follows a peer-to-peer blind-selection method by the current participants of Onassis AiR 2020/21. During Phase II the selected applications will be reviewed by the Onassis AiR team together with an advisory board consisting of Grégory Castéra, Binna Choi & Marianna Takou (Casco Art Institute), Ilaria Conti, Karthik Pandian, and Piergiorgio Pepe.

The working language of fall 2021 & spring 2022 Movement Groups is English.

All accepted participants will receive a research fee, housing, travel to/from Athens, a collective research budget, and other resources.

Our past present
Driven by its founding principles that are based upon collective artistic research and a self-organized and process-oriented ethos, Onassis AiR, the (inter)national artistic research residency program in Athens, continues to evolve as a growing community of peers from Greece and abroad. Like any living organism that continually grows based on information extracted from its surrounding environment, Onassis AiR transforms and adapts its programs with characteristics that are passed from one movement to the next. From individual research needs to fostering a collective research study, the experiential and the tactile have become core components of how we think and practice together. Over the past 18 months, we have experienced different ways of “cohabitation” in the AiR house, that now belongs to more than 50 artists, curators and art practitioners, who between September 2019 and January 2021, have taken part in programs developed by Onassis AiR in collaboration with our participants, colleagues, and guests.

Onassis AiR was established by the Onassis Foundation in September 2019. Onassis AiR team: Ash Bulayev, Nefeli Myrodia, Georgia Giannakea and Myrto Katsimicha.

Please click here to see the full Open Call announcement and link to the application form.