Getxophoto Open Call 2025

2025 GETXOPHOTO OPEN CALL

The 8th edition of Getxophoto’s Open Call offers visual artists and photographers from all over the world the opportunity to exhibit their work at the next edition of the Festival, to be held in June 2025. “REC” will be the theme of the 19th edition.

The jury, made up of Verónica Fieiras (Editor, founder of Chaco editorial and director of Escuela Migra), Carla Bacelar (Encontros da Imagem), María Wills (Independent curator) and María Ptqk (Getxophoto Festival), four women from Buenos Aires, Bogota, Braga and Bilbao, will select 12 finalist projects and 3 winners. The latter will form part of the artistic programme of Getxophoto 2025.

ABOUT REC

First we pressed the PAUSE button, then the PLAY button, and now we’re hitting REC. The round red symbol, always so easy to find on cameras and electronic devices, takes its name from record, to save, film or register. Whether still or moving, the relationship between the image and memory is a central theme in visual studies that has captured the attention of great minds in the past such as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Georges Didi-Huberman. But what remains of this relationship today in contemporary image technologies?

Our throwaway culture means that we no longer take photographs or videos to treasure moments, but to share them and forget them instantly, and we face an overwhelming abundance that wears our sensitivity down, turning all visual memory into pure noise. Added to this is the unprecedented proliferation of fake images –which collapse our concept of ​​reality– and the conversion of any document into a file readable only by non-human intelligences, with software and devices designed to quickly become scrap metal. Furthermore, the structural limits of data centres, where we store memories without taking into account their enormous needs for water and energy, threaten the future of the “archive”, both personal and civilising (Spoiler alert: it won’t be possible to keep all the information).

These are just some of the factors meaning that visual technologies are facing a gigantic paradigm shift today. That is why, in the next edition of Getxophoto, we ask ourselves how the visual media arts are reinventing themselves in this scenario: what is the difference between accumulating archives and telling a story, what is the future of images –and of memory constructed through visual registers– in a world with extreme, immaterial, easily manipulated and apparently infinite REC.