Open Call: Multidisciplinary artists interested in language, language loss and revival, climate change, decolonization, alternate imaginings of past, present, and future

This open call is for early-mid career multidisciplinary artists who live, work, or otherwise have some connection to Cornwall, to present a new or existing body of work in February or March 2025.

What is the project?

This project seeks to ask questions around loss and revival of Cornish language in Cornwall. Outcomes for this project are non-prescriptive, but themes and questions it will explore centre around:

• What knowledges, ways of interacting with the world and one another are held in endangered languages? What do we lose when those languages and knowledges are lost?
• What are the relationships between language loss and biodiversity loss?
• What might the islands comprising the UK have looked like if not for English linguistic, cultural, political, and economic domination?
• What do dialect/accent or ways of performing language signal about inclusion, exclusion, power, and modernity?
• What does revival of endangered languages and cultures look like in 2025 and beyond?

Related themes and questions this project seeks to explore are:

• Alternate imaginings of history and the future
• Alternate imaginings of community, culture, resource and land use

The final form this project takes — whether an events/live series, or object-based exhibition format — will depend on what artists produce. As such, it is open to all disciplines and media. Submissions received will, additionally, shape themes, format, and venue.