La parola ai corpi

CALL FOR ARTISTS 2026 – CHALLENGING COSMOLOGIES

 Tuesday 9th – Monday 15th June 2026, Atelier 12, Palermo, Italy

Applications by Monday 6th April 2026 (17:00 pm CET)  >>  Download the full pdf version and apply

«Quando completei dez anos, comecei a adestrar bois. Foi assim que aprendi que adestrar e colonizar são a mesma coisa. Tanto o adestrador quanto o colonizador começam por desterritorializar o ente atacado quebrando-lhe a identidade, tirando-o de sua cosmologia, distanciando-o de seus sagrados, impondo-lhe novos modos de vida e colocando-lhe outro nome. O processo de denominação é uma tentativa de apagamento de uma memória para que outra possa ser composta.»

(Antônio Bispo dos Santos, A terra dá a terra quer)

A FEW LINES ON THE OPEN CALL

Every empire establishes an order of the visible and imposes its own denominations. The Mercator projection, created in the 16th century and still widely used in the West, was designed to guide navigation and imperial expansion. On this map some territories are enlarged while others shrink or disappear, revealing who occupies the center of discourse, who remains at the margins, and which memories and narratives are privileged over others. What possibilities do our artistic practices offer for creating tension within – and shifting – dominant regimes of visibility?

Orders of the visible, forms of colonization, and regimes of memory shape how we live, perceive, and experience the world. Colonisation did not only occupy territories: it imposed modes of thought, stratified bodies and knowledges, and determined which lives, practices, and cosmologies could be recognized as legitimate. These logics continue to operate today in the cultural industry and so in circus, regulating who is seen, which stories circulate, and which remain silenced. They shape the languages we speak and the relation to the words we use; they organise our perceptions, relations and behaviours that run through our present. 

The circus, as both a practice and a space of creation, carries these historical and symbolic layers. It is neither neutral nor isolated from its context: it can reproduce mechanisms of normativity, hierarchy, and control of vision, or choose to disrupt them. Some bodies become images; others escape representation, opening spaces of resistance and possibility. Circus creation often flirts with myths of freedom and with the figure of mastery over nature, revealing the inheritances of colonial logics but also the space to unsettle invisible structures and predetermined narratives through the production of images. How can artistic practices evoke suppressed memories, challenge inherited models, and counter-colonise imaginaries? What do we need to challenge in order to transform how we perceive the world and the bodies that inhabit it, breaking with hegemonic regimes of visibility? 

By decentralizing the gaze from the center of the map, LA PAROLA AI CORPI 2026 draws on decolonial perspectives and countercolonial practices shaping a shared thinking space to reflect on collective memory, image-making processes and their meanings, looking at how they shape and open up possibilities in our artistic practices. 

WHY PALERMO?

This year LA PAROLA AI CORPI moves from Milan to Palermo, from the North to the South of Italy. Often perceived as peripheral from a European perspective, Palermo sits at the center of the nautical routes of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a city shaped by crossings—where histories, powers, and imaginaries have layered over centuries.

Sicily, and Palermo in particular, has long been a territory of passages, occupations, and overlapping sovereignties – from the Phoenicians and the Ancient Greeks to the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, Arab and Islamic dynasties, the Normans, the Swabians, the Angevins, the Austrian Habsburgs, the Bourbon Kingdom, to the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian Republic and, in contemporary times, a persistent United States presence in the military bases. This long sequence of dominations is not merely a historical list: it is an often hidden set of unseen layers that has contributed to built the Italian national identity and make Sicily a fertile ground for questioning how power, identity, and cultural narratives are constructed, imposed, and resisted. In this context, Palermo becomes a resonant site to rethink the arts beyond centralized perspectives.

Positioned along one of the most contested borders of contemporary Europe, the city also offers a point from which to critically reflect on the imaginaries on which the White narratives of Fortress Europe are built.

Thanks to the collaboration with Atelier 12, we will engage in a critical gaze on circus as an art of creation.