Het Nieuwe Instituut announces annual call for fellows 2022

Application deadline: August 10, 2022

Het Nieuwe Instituut has conducted and funded research in architecture, design, and digital culture since its founding in 2013. Publications, seminars, archive searches, and exhibitions have all been used as platforms for the advancement of research, in addition to serving as its outputs. Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Fellowship Programme, which was started by previous Head of Research Marina Otero Verzier, is essential to these platforms. The fellowship is ultimately a chance to practice using other ways of thinking and doing. Its purpose is to support and learn from a variety of research efforts and approaches. Testing Grounds is the suggested topic for the open call in 2022, according to the Research department.

This year’s request for fellows is focused on promoting research practices as testing grounds in keeping with the fellowship program’s ongoing goal to practice alternative ways of thinking and acting. We may identify research reasons, test out approaches, and create tools by looking at these testing grounds as action areas and networks of relationships. This year’s theme emphasizes “testing grounds” as methods of conducting research rather than just the content of the investigation.

Although they can also be muddy, pliable, and mobile ecologies of being, grounds are frequently thought of as permanent entities. Although it is commonly believed that grounds contain, nourish, and “ground” bodies, this is not always the case. Inequality has existed on the ground for both human and non-human existence. How can those lands be restored? Where is there room to care for and heal them? In this open call, the term “grounds” is used to refer to “issue spaces,” “groups of grounding or belonging,” and “discussion grounds.”

Testing grounds also refer to military or colonial endeavors, in which “the ground” and “the abroad” are considered as venues for investigating repressive patterns of being, in addition to the field or “ground” to test ideas, alluding to innovation and laboratory narratives. How might the testing ground be reimagined as a non-extractive, anti-colonial, intersectional, feminist, more-than-human ground for acting in a different way? Testing grounds for collaborative acts that lay the groundwork for practicing radical healing co-creation models that encompass all life, not for exclusive and sanitized study.

Initiating alternative policy models, regenerating new institutions, retooling archives and forms of heritage, while shifting our attention to the messy methodologies and dynamic processes that occur while making change happen, are just a few of the testing grounds and sites for action-based forms of research Het Nieuwe Instituut offers through this open call.

The testing grounds mentioned in the open call may extend outside Het Nieuwe Instituut’s institutional and fellowship grounds. This open appeal also requests that alternative sites, collaborative methods, ecologies, cosmologies, and cosmograms be taken into account.

About the Research Fellowships

Two six-month Research Fellowship jobs are available from Het Nieuwe Instituut (from October 2022 to March 2023). A maximum budget of 20,000 euros is included for each of these roles. A withholding tax might apply to stipends.

There is no restriction on candidates’ ages. All individuals and groups from all residences are encouraged to apply. It is not necessary to submit a curriculum vitae or letters of recommendation. All academic levels and subjects are eligible for the fellowships (design, architecture and digital culture). Those without degrees or institutional ties who can also show a high level of creativity, critical thinking, and other potential in their particular professions will be given equal consideration.

The resources of Het Nieuwe Instituut, such as the library, archives, exhibitions, workstations, and presentation spaces, are available to fellows on a daily basis. In conjunction with Het Nieuwe Instituut’s other departments and ongoing institutional alliances, additional resources might be accessible.

For more information about the call for fellows, click here.  

Applications are open from June 20 until August 10, 2022. 

Het Nieuwe Instituut
Museumpark 25
3015 CB Rotterdam
The Netherlands