This is an opportunity to shape the relationships that sustain our ecosystems.

The climate crisis is a global reality, unfolding across different scales, in varied forms, and with varying intensities. While its accelerating effects are now acknowledged worldwide, they are felt most severely and disproportionately by communities in the global majority.

Cover image courtesy of Cycle 2 Fellow Guely Morató Loredo.

Artists and cultural practitioners are actively responding to this crisis through a wide range of approaches — from hands-on interventions to expansive reflections; from examining the microscopic to connecting broad communities; from documenting injustices to advocating for intersectional climate justice and imagining paths forward.

Cultural & Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis (CAREC) is a multidisciplinary programme that supports artistic and cultural practices critically engaging with the relations, dynamics, and infrastructures that shape our ecosystems — including their political, social, and temporal dimensions. It welcomes individuals exploring how climate justice can be approached through aesthetically evocative actions that articulate reciprocal and adaptive connections between humans, more-than-humans, and the environment.

Within the programme’s broader inquiry, CAREC investigates the contextual dynamics between aesthetic responses and politics, and how technologies — from everyday and traditional to digital approaches — can be used, often in combination, to foster meaningful engagements. At its core, the programme places a strong emphasis on ethical frameworks, particularly in relation to community involvement, material sourcing, and knowledge systems. CAREC critically reflects on the responsibilities carried by artists and creatives, underscoring the need for approaches that reject extractivist practices in favour of cooperation, accountability, and mutual respect.

Programme

CAREC is a process-based programme designed to foster critical thinking, care, empowerment, and collective imagination. It brings together nine mid-career creatives (with approximately 7 to 15 years of relevant professional experience) working across a wide range of mediums, methodologies, and interpretations of the overarching theme. Supported by three Senior Fellows, the selected cohort will spend nine months engaging in a collaborative journey — one that supports each participant’s individual practice and explores how it can be activated within their local and thematic contexts. The programme also facilitates exchange within the cohort, across CAREC’s growing network, and with relevant external practitioners.

Each participant receives an Award of €10,000 and dedicated guidance from the Senior Fellows to further develop the concept for a body of work initially outlined in their application. While the grant is not limited to a strict project plan or budget, the participant’s proposed project will be used as a baseline for the programme and will orient its content.  That said, CAREC places less emphasis on deliverables or fixed outcomes. Instead, it prioritizes the participant’s curiosity, motivation, and the themes they deeply engage with, rather than the fulfillment of a predetermined proposal.

The programme consists of various online interactive formats, such as peer group sessions, individual feedback, and guest speaker sessions. We will also meet in person once within the programme in the form of a "Lab Week", an intensive fellowship gathering. Lastly, the programme carries a group project for the cohort. Though part of an institutional structure with a set timeline and framework, CAREC is intentionally designed to be adaptable and responsive to the cohort’s evolving needs. It aims to provide the space, rhythm, and nourishment that creative imagination so urgently requires in this moment.

The programme activities require an average time commitment of 20 hours per month, though this varies throughout the year. Moreover, participants should be comfortable sharing ideas in spoken English to foster a space of mutual learning and exchange.

Eligibility

With this open call we invite applications from individual, mid-career artists and cultural practitioners who:

• Are from, live and work in our eligible countries;

• Artists and cultural practitioners, as defined for this programme, are individuals with their own artistic practice. We adopt a broad and inclusive understanding of art and culture, welcoming interdisciplinary approaches. However, professionals such as arts managers, facilitators, academic researchers, or others without a personal artistic practice are not considered eligible to apply;

• Have ±7-15 years of relevant professional experience. The Fellows Award is meant only for individual artists who, regardless of age, meet the professional experience criteria, counting from the date they started engaging in a professional artistic practice to the date of submitting their application.;

• Are able to communicate in English to keep in line with the communication in the Fellows Award programme.