Akademickie Centrum Designu - Open call – Design in process – Fluid Bodies

Open call – Design in process – Fluid Bodies

« back

The Academic Design Centre

announces a call for

artists, designers, scholars for:

  • academic conferences – workshop meetings
  • (sharing individual, practical, creative experience) culminating in an academic/album publication,
  • the Creative and Curatorial Competitions of the ART&DESIGN2025 Festival.

 

Steps

see the list of open calls!

  • 3 photos of the artwork in the resolution of 72 dpi and 300 dpi (.jpg and .tiff), work labels (title, technique, size and year of creation);
  • a brief description of the work up to 1 000 characters without spaces and a bio up to 500 characters without spaces;
  • details for the contract (full name, ID CARD, full address of residence; information on the replacement value of the work);
  • Step 2. Consultation concerning the submitted work with the project curator;
  • Step 3. Confirmation of participation in the conference and in the Creative competition - selection of works for the main exhibitions of the festival, and the Curatorial competition - jury selection of art/design duos. The results of the two competitions within the ART&DESIGN 2025 Festival are settled consecutively in October 2025 and December 2025.
  • Step 4. Participation in DESIGN IN PROCESS ends with the publication of a collective academic monographic multi-author publication with reviews / theoretical articles. The publication contains photographs and descriptions of art and design works. It is the only Polish publication that merges art and design.

 

The “Design in Process” project is implemented within the framework of the Operational Programme Infrastructure and Environment 2014-2020, PRIORITY: VII Protection of Cultural Heritage and Development of Cultural Resources, ACTION: 8.1 Protection of Cultural Heritage and Development of Cultural Resources is aimed at theoreticians, designers, artists, scientists and academic lecturers as well as professionally independent professionals, i.e. the social creative and business classes. The year-long cycle of the “Design in Process” project, i.e. 8 academic conferences - workshop meetings (sharing individual, practical, creative experience and discussion) and exhibitions, is crowned by two competitions, Curatorial and Creator, and ART&DESIGN - a collective scientific multi-author album-monograph.

The contribution during the conference includes the preparation of several photographs of the work, the description of the work and a biographical note – see above. A laptop (HDMI input, USB), a projector, a screen of approx. 9 sq. m. are available in the single-storey conference room on the first floor.

Conference and open call registration dates below.

The Academic Design Centre (ADC) provides the following as part of the events: minimum two nights' accommodation (from the day before the conference and up to the day after the conference) in double rooms located on the second floor of the ADC. Coffee and lunch during the conference are served on the ground floor of the ADC building.

We invite you to read the curatorial description and themes of the conference.

 

FLUID BODIES

When looking at the naked ancestral human organism with the “animal” zoe particle, one simply thinks of an organic form. The body is a structure composed mainly of water, blood, urine, sperm, bile, saliva, serous fluids, a whole range of bodily fluids. The fascination with the body, the organs and the internal fluids has not ceased. The ancient Greek notion of “dzoē” characterises living entities (animals, humans and gods), while ‘bíos’ means the life of a group of organisms. Zoe is like wild life, movement, flow, the performativity of a new materialism, or perhaps the materiality of masculinity? Such a broad post-anthropocentric perspective suggests thinking of the body in terms not of the “how” of the body but of the body “elsewhere”. The embodiment is a fluid relationship, occurring between all the elements of the “system”. Lightness and fluidity, the biological strategy of observing from the position of nature and the body[1] unifies the body as a fluid creation and returns as a new physiology or anatomy.

They are fluid physiological movement, continuous organic matter[2].

The technological rush, the unnatural circulation to which man is subjected, changes his posture, genetics and has an irrevocable impact on the essence of the body. Evolutionary medicine, personalised, aesthetic, bio-regeneration and stimulation, non-surgical treatments, personalised implants and skin tissue, neuroaesthetics, muscle electrostimulation, transplantology, orthoses/prostheses, replacement organs, bioengineering, minimally invasive treatment techniques, experimental gene techniques, tissue banks and many, many other “signs of progress” unfortunately often equal the appropriation, degradation and anonymity of human bodies. Who are the owners of the organs, where are the bodies?

Ronald D. Laing notes in “The Politics of Experience” that “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul.”                    

“I call experience a journey to the end of the possible of man.” - G. Bataille[3]

curator

Magdalena Komborska-Łączna

 

  • OPEN CALL

PRIMARY STRUCTURES OF BODIES

Academic conference - a workshop-type meeting (sharing individual, practical, creative experience) on 22.04.2025 (12.00 - 17.00).

OPEN CALL application deadline: 14.03.2025

Fields: ceramic design, sculpture, interior design, ceramic and glass industry, materials engineering, applied ceramics, artistic ceramics, ceramic glaze design, engaged ecology, bio design.

Analysis and/or methods: making ceramic masses for indoor and outdoor use, user-oriented design, affordances or anti-affordances, object as a body marker, (is creating a product that people will love or understand to become the goal of design? External design or internal design?).

Range of presentation topics and techniques: non-objective body, body at the technology frontier, athlete's body, ‘intentionality’ of the body and its being-in-the-world, hi-tech ceramics productions, flexible ceramics and 3D.

 

  • OPEN CALL

STORIES OF CREATIVE BODIES

Academic conference - a workshop-type meeting (sharing individual, practical, creative experience)on 06.06.2025 (12.00 - 17.00).

OPEN CALL application deadline: 11.04.2025.

Fields: product and film photography, set design, costume design, fine art photography, styling, clothing design (works related to cosmogenesis, in particular to the evolution of the human world here and now, that is, to the local situation of the natural and domestic environment as well as socio-economic environment).

Analysis and/or methods: psychology of daily activities, cognition and emotion, levels of processing: primary, behavioural, reflective levels.

Range of presentation topics and techniques: advertising and product photography, disappearance of the body, physical heterogeneity

 

  • OPEN CALL

THE MATTER OF BODY AND IMAGE

Academic conference - a workshop-type meeting (sharing individual, practical, creative experience) on 04.07.2025 (12.00 - 17.00).

OPEN CALL application deadline: 09.05.2025.

Fields: performing arts, design for rehabilitation, performance spaces design, social design, product design and sustainable design, design systems, medical design, medical illustration .

Analysis and/or methods: physical limitations, learned helplessness, human errorcommunication and interpretation, precise behaviour and imprecise knowledge, individualization, orientation, omissions and mistakes.

 Range of presentation topics and techniques: identity performance, physiotherapy including rehabilitation methods such as dry needle therapy - a method for reducing pain and muscle tension, manual therapies, relaxation, stabilization exercises.

 

  • OPEN CALL

TASTES AND SOUNDS OF THE BODY

Academic conference - a workshop-type meeting (sharing individual, practical, creative experience) on 09.09.2025 (12.00 - 17.00).

OPEN CALL application deadline: 11.07.2025.

Fields: graphic design, textile, theatrical and film costume design, interior decoration and design, sustainable design.

Analysis and/or methods: human memory and device memory, mapping, service, experience and process design, user interaction ecosystem.

Range of presentation topics and techniques: discursive body, “spatialization of corporeality”, interactive body, lack of corporeal boundaries, misophonia, hypersensitivity, highly sensitive people, sensory spaces

 

Organizers: the Academic Design Centre and the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts Łódź

Graphics: Mariusz Andryszczyk 

 

 

 

[1] Gernot Böhme postulated thinking of the human body as the nature that it essentially is, he referred to this as the so-called “interiority of the exterior”.

[2] Rosi Braidotti believes that ‘the posthuman subject is the expression of successive waves of becoming, induced by the ontological force of zoe’.

[3] G. Battaille, “Inner Experience”, in:  https://www.willhall.net/files/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceAndBirdOfParadise.pdf (p. 18), in: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/files/2016/10/BatailleANGL.pdf  (p.6)