Following the previous editions of ESNMA — which explored the field itself, its reconfigurations, and its urgencies — the 2026 edition proposes a broader reflection on the notion of territory as a space of perception, belonging, interaction, and cultural construction.
The exploration we propose is inherently heterogeneous. We inhabit different territories, move across distinct geographies, and experience unequal material and political conditions. The land, air, and water to which we—human and more-than-human—belong weave a different fabric for each of us. Territory is not a fixed or bounded entity, but a relational and dynamic condition shaped through coexistence, displacement, interconnection, and conflict. Living organisms and non-living systems share territories and are constituted by them. To expand our possibilities, we need to transgress. Each transgression depends on its own limits—systems of oppression, as well as intellectual, sensory, or affective constraints. The leakage between territories opens routes toward new forms of belonging, interconnection and collective imagination.
In a critical conjuncture marked by territorial conflicts, digital colonization, and forced displacement, this call invites artists and researchers engaged in speculative and experimental practices to imagine and construct new forms of habitability through sound, performance, moving image, computation, bioart, AI systems, networked practices, and new media experimentation.
Areas and Communication Topics
- Performance, Migration and Spatial Practice
- Sound Art and Material Ecologies
- Bioart and Ecological Media
- Digital Territories and Technological Autonomy
- Cyberfeminist, Decolonial and Speculative Frameworks
- Hybrid Epistemologies, Memory and Ancestral Knowledge
- Outer Space and Extraterrestrial Imaginaries
Call for Abstracts until August 31 here.
Territories for Reflection and Speculation
In what ways can performance unfold between bodies and space as an active field of relation, where movement, migration and displacement are reshaped through new spatial conditions across political borders and mediated environments?
Sonic and new media practices attune perception beyond cartographic logics, toward the material agencies of land, water, atmosphere, minerals, electromagnetic fields, and more-than-human presences woven into the textured fabric of inhabited worlds. Bodies, soils, organic matter, and cultivated systems are already engaged in shared processes of becoming. Artistic practices can render this interdependence perceptible, enacting the entanglement of human and more-than-human participants as a site of transformation.
How can bioart and ecological media practices reconfigure understandings of life, matter, and environment through regenerative and sustainable approaches? How might they challenge extractive logics of production and control by proposing alternative conditions for multispecies habitability?
Digital territories — algorithmic geographies, virtual environments, and contested spaces of data circulation — are also sites of practice, where artists employ open-source software, hardware, AI systems, and autonomous technological infrastructures as forms of resistance against proprietary black-box systems and regimes of technological dependency.
In what ways can open-access technologies redistribute agency within individuals and communities, enabling alternative forms of technological autonomy, collective knowledge production, and infrastructural self-determination?
Cyberfeminist, decolonial, and speculative frameworks extend this potential further, mobilizing digital tools to critique dominant power relations embedded within technological systems. At the same time, they activate intersections between ancestral knowledge systems, computational media, biotechnology, and networked communication to generate hybrid epistemologies that reconfigure relationships between lineage, embodiment, and technological development.
Finally, what new territorial disputes, modes of extraction, and forms of occupation emerge through space technologies? How might artistic practices critically reclaim or reimagine these expanding frontiers, engaging with orbital infrastructures, satellite technologies, remote sensing, and extraterrestrial imaginaries as the next contested territory?
