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International Call for Fellows 2019: Announcement of the final selection

Through its annual Call for Fellows, Het Nieuwe Instituut's Research Department invited practitioners and researchers to work in residence from September 2019 to February 2020. The jury recognised and awarded a Research Fellowship to three projects, each of which demonstrated critical rigour and a depth of understanding of the broader issues that are at stake in their proposal.

3 June 2019

Offerings seeking blessings, wealth and good fortune, Aje Shrine, Ile Ife. Photo by Dele Adeyemo.

The three selected proposals depart from locally embedded stories and contexts, but also connect to urgent global questions addressed in this year's Call. All the projects are sharply positioned within current political discourses and ecological thinking, and demonstrate urgency, ambition and precision.

The selected Research Fellows are Dele Adeyemo with Alien Possession, Paolo Patelli with Is it Biology or Geology? Life and Death as Multispecies Formations and Claudia Rot with Beyond Polderen: Exposing the Voids of Environmental Justice in the Netherlands.

Read more about the awarded projects and extended collaborations in the jury report.

BURN-OUT. Exhaustion on a Planetary Scale

For this iteration of the Call for Fellows, the Research Department selected the theme of _BURN-OUT. Exhaustion on a Planetary Scale_. This theme addresses the unrelenting pressure and divisive and exploitative climates under which bodies are exhausted. Building upon last year's Call, the 2019 research trajectory aims to instigate forms of coexistence, sensibility, and care for multispecies collective bodies in times of planetary burnout.

Selection process

Between the announcement of the Open Call for Fellows on 18 March and the deadline on 22 April, Het Nieuwe Instituut received 197 entries. Proposals came from Australia, Austria, Barbados, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, India, Italy, Peru, Romania, South Africa, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and many other countries.

The proposals were reviewed by a jury comprised of Guus Beumer (General and Artistic Director, Het Nieuwe Instituut), Revital Cohen (artist, Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen), Cooking Sections (spatial practitioners, Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Elaine Gan (artist and scholar, Assistant Professor / Faculty Fellow at the Center for Experimental Humanities, NYU) and Christina Sharpe (Professor of Humanities, York University and Distinguished Visiting Professor, Ryerson University). The jury was chaired by Marina Otero Verzier (Director of Research, Het Nieuwe Instituut) and Katía Truijen (Senior Researcher, Het Nieuwe Instituut).

The applications were evaluated on the basis of their engagement with the Fellowship theme, depth of investigation, urgency of the project, idiosyncrasy, connection to Het Nieuwe Instituut's mission, and potential for exchange between Fellows and across disciplinary boundaries. A longer report on current research topics, references, languages, geographies and methodologies based on the 197 proposals will be published by Het Nieuwe Instituut's Research Department this autumn.

Note for editors

For more information please and press images contact Silvie van Oost via email: s.vanoost@hetnieuweinstituut.nl or phone +31 6 57 98 13 88.

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