Open Call for Landing Issue 4 "Why Cut When You Can Fade" (until 10th June 2026)

While our artistic themes and appetitions change and turn over time, the editors of this issue have a sustained interest in the politics of how we work and based on what worlding-views. This matters more than media or research tasks, because our values for operating together can weave a fabric of trust, which in turn allows honesty and vulnerability to become central to all the relations within a collaborative artistic and research work.

We seek poetic / polemic / essayistic / visual and audiovisual contributions that treat making together not solely a means to produce outcomes, but as a site of questioning, entanglement, and walking-talking together—where a pause itself may be called a result. We’re not questioning whether artistic or scientific or literary etc. outputs are necessary or relevant; rather, we consider that outcomes should include material, immaterial, and animate traces, failed moves and inexplicable sensations—in short a multitude of relations.

Who Should Apply

LANDING’s community is focused on contributions from early-stage, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, including, but not limited to those working within performance, sound, choreography, theatre, cinema, visual arts and related fields. We also welcome contributions from practitioners not affiliated with academic institutions.

In particular, LANDING Issue 4 “Why Cut When You Can Fade” is dedicated to resonant and diverse practices of inter- or trans-disciplinary groups that:

• Combine artistic, scientific, social scientific etc. research methods in ways that bridge disciplinary distance.
• Rely on image-making and somatic media for probing forms, materials, and gestures, while attempting to meet what is yet unknown.
• Approach collaborative work through circularity and degrowth, by rethinking systems and protocols, choosing materials and methods with less imprint and more resonance within the living world.
• Privilege conversations, human or other-than-human entanglement, and the slow walk of co-creation, where the “ongoingness” of practice is the work.

We especially welcome contributions that reflect on or enact:

• The politics of making—material, relational, temporal, aesthetic, value-laden— by sharing protocols of how you make art/research together.
• Practices that privilege encounter, dialogue, and slowness over fixed results.
• Approaches that re-combine text, film, sound, somatic practices, visual or performative works, by privileging the risks involved in hybrid or open-ended forms.
• A poetics of degrowth, unlearning, and reconfiguring protocols of collaboration.
• Outlines of methodologies, broadly understood, that can be read, tried out, and adapted even though they contain elements of not-knowing.
• The ethical stakes of collaboration—how responsibility, authority, and care are distributed and negotiated.
• Failure, drift, and unfinished gestures—what happens when collaborative attempts don’t resolve neatly.
• If you’re considering starting a process of collaboration for this call, we suggest descriptions that focus on: a) the research task the collaboration is setting out to tackle, but we strongly advise including concrete material artefacts from the foundational stages of the collaboration.

Full Submission Guidelines

We are looking forward to reading an outline for an original contribution, with relevant biographical and contextual information.  Where is the submission coming from (place, time, precedents, enablers, ancestors)?

You may interpret “outline” according to your chosen forms (see below).

Script outlines, text outlines, logical or illogical planners, animation beats are all valid, and may also include sketches, scores, rehearsal notes, or other materials emerging from artistic processes, so long as they help us decide whether your contribution will inspire readers and makers to convene around the question:

What specific protocols can bring about resonant and relational practices with others, keeping collaborations organically evolving / dissolving?

• Duos or groups are invited to apply. We regard transdisciplinarity positively, as well as collaborations across sub-disciplines and genres (performing arts, biochemistry, creative writing, urban design, graphic arts, found footage, movement therapy etc).
• Contributions may take the form of:
  • an essayistic text (up to 4000 words)
  • the communication of transdisciplinary research that works in a published book (including formats combining documentation, reflection, and practice-based material)
  • a short film with annotation and a context statement; for durational works, up to 10 minutes are allowed. These could be distributed as a sequence of excerpts and written text.
  • a visualization, sound piece, or other hybrid audiovisual or interactive formats. For durational works, up to 10 minutes are allowed. These could be distributed as a sequence of excerpts and written text.
• Visual / film / performance contributions. If on digital video, up to 10 minutes are expected, with full transcript. Include a 300–500 word contextual statement which reflects on the collaborative aspect and the research task at hand.

 

How to Apply

The deadline for the submission of your outline is June 10th, 2026, 23:59 EET.

By outline we mean a plan of your textual argumentation or flow of thoughts, with supporting evidence in the form of materials.

Send us one PDF document with all the materials intended for consideration, up to 8 pages maximum. We will consult this material on a screen, including hyperlinks and multimedia content. Please begin with a short introductory note inside the PDF that reveals where your submission is reaching us from, briefly mentioning the origins of the collective work that is the basis of your transdisciplinary research.

Should you have any questions before sending your outline, we will do our best to respond. Please send queries by 1st of June.

All communication should be sent to landing@vda.lt (and will be taken care of by Miki Ambrózy, Sophie Durand and the issue’s guest editors).

About the Editors

Why Cut When You Can Fade? is a research space for conversations, experiments, and collective gatherings, operating in Lithuania by artist-researchers  Miki (Miklós) Ambrózy, Miglė Križinauskaitė and Greta Grinevičiūtė. We approach collaboration as a way of slowing down, staying with processes, and resisting extractive or product-driven logics. Rather than cutting to the point, we ask how a fade—a lingering, porous gesture—can open space for attention, ethics, and shared authorship. This issue of LANDING extends our cluster’s work towards publishing, inviting other voices to reflect on how collaboration reshapes practices, relationships, and outcomes.

_{LANDING is focused on how practice-based research is done on the ground, in the studio, in the  world, with and through materials and other forms of life. Rather than existing in the space of theory and speculation, LANDING  is focused on the doing of research and its explicit or tacit methods. It wants to operate as a space of conversation and resource for fellow practitioners. LANDING wants to imbue encouragement and excitement about the trajectory of research done by artists, designers, architects; one’s own as well as the research of others.}

Publisher

LANDING is a project of the Doctoral Department of Vilnius Academy of Arts. LANDING's publication and human labour is financed by the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The journal is printed at Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishing House (Leidykla) and is available in the open source Open Journal System.