COST Artistic Intelligence | Geografía Poética Workshop

Who can apply

Artists, researchers, PhD candidates, and early-career practitioners.

Geografía Poética

Geografía Poética is conceived as a space of contact in the vast threshold between the rural and the urban, grounded in situated research and artistic practices in context. It proposes a field of relations between community, heritage, and territory, where artistic practice becomes a way of observing, inscribing, and activating the correspondences between place and its inhabitants — natural and naturalised — across the layers of a sensitive fabric shaped by soil, atmosphere, landscape, crops, cultures, memory, and lived experience. In this framework, poetics opens a space where these connections may become perceptible, possible, and transferable through affections, bonds, empathy, and shared processes of reflection and making.

The workshop

The workshop will be guided by a set of key notions central to Geografía Poética — art in context, heritage, ecofeminism, community, and territory — which frame the workshop’s way of thinking, acting, and being in context. These notions are not approached as fixed themes, but as open orientations for practice, reflection, and exchange. The workshop takes the form of a shared process of inquiry grounded in the specific conditions of an Atlantic island context. Over four days, participants will engage in collective sessions, conversations, walks, moments of observation, and site-responsive practices shaped by the material, ecological, social, and symbolic conditions of Ons Island. Rather than focusing on fixed outcomes, the workshop foregrounds process, situated attention, coexistence, and collective exploration. It invites participants to reflect on how artistic intelligence may emerge through listening, walking, observation, notation, conversation, and forms of making that respond to place and context.

The workshop is conceived not only as a shared process of situated inquiry, but also as the starting point for a collective public outcome. The reflections, contributions, processes, and poetic actions developed during the residency will form part of a collective exposition on Research Catalogue, allowing the workshop to extend beyond the time spent on Ons Island and to enter into dialogue with wider artistic research contexts.

The workshop will also offer an opportunity to connect with artists and researchers working across different territories and practices, while sharing time, process, and reflection in a singular insular environment.

Further information about Ons Island and visitor access can be found on the official website of the Atlantic Islands National Park.
The workshop will be led by Holga Méndez Fernández (University of Vigo) and Belén Díez Atienza (University of Zaragoza), co-founders of Geografía Poética, with support from WG3 Leader Casper Schipper (Research Catalogue).

Participation

Participation is free. Travelling and per diem costs are covered by the COST action.

Application

You can apply through the form located here.

Important information:

• The deadline for expression of interest is 22 July 2026, 23:55 CEST.
• Applicants will be notified around 25 July 2026.
• The workshop takes place from 22 to 26 September 2026 on Ons Island.
• The travelling dates are 22 and 26 September 2026.
• Maximum number of participants: 15.
• For more information, please contact: holga.mendez@uvigo.gal and casper@researchcatalogue.net
• For reimbursement information, please consult the COST rules.