Offener Aufruf 2026

AGE OF DESCENT (DISSENT)

Open call for project submissions until Friday, December 15, 2025.
The selected projects for WIENWOCHE 2025 will take place from September 11 to 20, 2026.

Indigenous astronomers and star gazers from across the world have warned of the coming of a comet big enough to destroy the entire city of Vienna and forecast to impact in September 2026—the exact time is currently unknown. Anticipating the comet’s impact—real or metaphoric— the activist and artistic initiative WIENWOCHE is already directing its 2026 resources toward projects that confront the city’s physical, existential, and political unraveling in this AGE OF DESCENT (DISSENT)

What characterises Vienna’s “AGE OF DESCENT”?

It is 2026, and Vienna has become uninhabitable and unbearable for dreamers and doers. In the cultural and political fields, power relations have been reproduced in the name of protecting Vienna’s civilians from its dark fascist past: Progressive, critical artistic and scientific research undergoes censorship and restrictions in the face of contradictory diversity and inclusion policy. Museums co-opt grassroots initiatives and sacred cultures to claim them as their own, and galleries and art collectors drool over marginalised bodies as commodities whilst they tokenise them in apathetic programming. The activist archetype has been labelled extremist, yet feeling exhausted, whilst biased and outdated media outlets portray the news as the truth.  

At the same time, it is an age of civil accountability and outrage: Informed, dissident voices become louder even in the face of silencing, and the brave are both punished and celebrated in a confusing fluctuation between institutional oppression and civil support, critique and scrutiny. 

As this city and many others edge toward descent, we ask dissident voices to rise up (dissent)!

Call to Action! 

Through AGE OF DESCENT (DISSENT), WIENWOCHE is looking for artistic/artistic research projects prioritising social impact and activism, which center world/city-(re)building in the conceptual and/or material sense. Which ideas, initiatives and ideologies should be prioritised in the face of the collapse of the city of Vienna? What do we carry into the future? What do we let go of and what do we reimagine?  WIENWOCHE is specifically looking for projects which propose new visions of the city as an urban and civil structure. What is a city anyway? What makes Vienna the city it is? And what could a city be if it was built to prioritise care, solidarity, and plurality rather than progress, profit and productivity? What could a city provide if it saw and included everyone as equal citizens (city-zens)? 

We will prioritise applications which aim to:

BUILD

• Rebuild worlds, and rethink cities. Imagine Vienna from the ground up: new artistic-centric ways of living together, new architectures of care, new solidarities.

BRIDGE

• Forge unlikely alliances by seeking collaborations across lines rarely crossed: artists with manual (construction, machine, agriculture/land-based, textile, waste, transport and delivery) workers, migrants with artistic, civic or scientific institutions (museums, theatres, research labs, other city-level projects), traditional crafts with digital code. 

DISSENT

• See DESCENT as an opportunity and DISSENT as a means to invent. Show us how dissent can be expressed through any medium of artistic expression which resonates with you and your project’s aim. 

RE-CREATE 

• Blend theory and practice, craft and imagination, collective ethics and everyday know-how — offering alternatives to capitalist ideas of profit and productivity.

The 2026 artistic concept is in part inspired by the short story “The Comet” (1920) - by writer, sociologist and activist W.E.B. Dubois -  one of the earliest recorded examples of Afrofuturist work. 

Hard facts

Deadline: 15 December 2025

Selected projects will take place within the WIENWOCHE festival: 11 - 20 September 2026.

Please send us

• Description of the project (1 A4 page max.)
• Profiles/CVs of the participants and roles in the team
• Information on the venues and spaces you might already have in mind for your projects
• Target groups and communities you are addressing and how you intend to reach them with your project
• Cost calculations (Please fill in the form BUDGET)
• Visual material

Languages: German, English (If you want to send your application in other languages, please write to us beforehand). Our team also speaks Turkish and BHS).

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Hybrid formats between political action and artistic work, discourse and knowledge production
• Activist/artist/artivist collaborations; co-operations between different initiatives/action groups; transdisciplinary (artistic) research teams 
• Community projects with a respectful, caring and participatory exchange with local communities
• Projects with the potential of creating infrastructures relevant to the communities
• Projects in non-institutional, off- and alternative spaces, public spaces; projects challenging institutional presentations
• Projects based on specific sites of historical and cultural importance in Vienna
• Projects respecting and building further on the legacies of fellow initiatives

WHO CAN APPLY

• Collectives, action groups and collaborating individuals
• Anyone living and based in Vienna

• Projects with a budget between 15.000 and 20.000 EUR

OUR MODE OF WORK

• WIENWOCHE proposes a framework with deadlines and requirements.
• Projects respect the deadlines suggested by the festival team.
• There will be three meetings with all selected projects and the WIENWOCHE team throughout the festival year. Individual meetings will be possible depending on the needs and the clarity of the project. 
• The Artistic Director of WIENWOCHE works and exchanges with the projects on the project concept, budget, formats and locations. Projects are open to suggestions, discussions and further collaborations.
• Projects are open to festival schedule date suggestions and the proposed number of events by the Artistic Director.
• Projects will assign their own conceptual/editorial, press/social media, production and finance representatives and include their names in the budget proposal.
• Projects will promote their events and attend the relevant exchange and festival programs.
• WIENWOCHE will host ecologically sustainable events, and we kindly ask you to check and comply with the criteria on the following website: https://www.oekoevent.at/.

OPEN CALL INFO MEETING

An online info meeting on the open call will be scheduled between November and December 2025. Further details will be provided.

SELECTION PROCESS

• Projects are selected by a jury (3 external members, Artistic Director and WIENWOCHE’s board.
• Information on the public jury meeting will be shared with all the pre-selected projects , and the event will focus on potentially interesting projects for the festival.
• After the preselection, the WIENWOCHE team will interview the feasible projects.

PUBLIC JURY MEETING

Dates

TBA - January 2026

JURY

Suzanna Futterknecht is a project, culture, and exhibition manager with expertise in project conception, communication, and participatory formats. She has gained extensive experience and accolades through her work at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna and at art:phalanx, an agency for art and communication. Since 2025, she works as a project manager at migrare - Center for Migrants Upper Austria, focusing on migration, diversity and participation.

Dalia Ahmed is a music journalist, radio presenter, curator, and DJ from Vienna, working at ORF Radio FM4 since 2015 where she presents new releases from the international and Austrian underground club scene on her DJ show "Dalia's Late Night Lemonade." As a freelance journalist, she writes reviews and articles for various magazines (including The Gap and Missy Magazine). Dalia’s curatorial work includes the "Austrian Museum for Black Entertainment and Black Music" as part of Wiener Festwochen at Belvedere 21 (2022), Vienna’s Popfest (2022), Civa Media Art Festival (2020), and Electric Spring (2019). Jury work includes Stadt Wien MA7, Vienna Business Agency (creative industries project & club culture), the International Music Journalism Award and Question Me & Answer ("On Stage"), among others.

Andrea Lumplecker works at the intersection of an artistic and curatorial practice, with an interest in learning-with. She is, together with Yasmina Haddad, part of the collective and off space school, which they have been running together in Vienna since 2011. Since 2021, Andrea has been running the Klasse für Alle at the University of applied Arts Vienna, with the aim of opening up access to the art university to a diverse audience. Intersectionality is at the center, and thus queer feminist theory, de-colonial agency and ecological intervention (compost care) join into an artistic practice through desire, kinship and empathy.