Open call for artists 2026

Theme of the call

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In 2026, KUĆĆA works under the thematic framework CUTE BUT PSYCHO, which is also the title of the 28th edition of Media Mediterranea. We are interested in research-based and interdisciplinary proposals that take a critical position towards contemporary technological, social, and political phenomena.

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CUTE BUT PSYCHO explores the emotional, superficial, and seemingly superfluous intensities of contemporary culture: the cute, the cringe, the zany, the weird - content that circulates endlessly online. Vulnerable aesthetics that render the world adorable, janky, awkward, and hyper-interesting in an I’ll-forget-this-in-two-seconds kind of way. These phenomena are integral to platform capitalism that monetizes affect, extracts data through participation, and renders attention a form of labor. Platform aesthetics that function as emotional infrastructures producing attachments, commodified intimacies, and algorithmically mediated identities. To participate is to oscillate between carefree pleasure and compulsive performance, between visibility and self-surveillance, contagiously blurring the boundaries between authentic and fake, attractive and repulsive, organic and artificially generated. In such environments, subjectivity becomes co-authored by users, platforms, and generative systems.

We are interested in the gendered, racialized, and political dimensions of softness and excess - how vulnerability can function both as tactic and trap, how it can operate as social regulation as much as resistance. We want to explore how such aesthetics might produce critical and engaged imaginaries, open new forms of intimacy, and unsettle established understandings of corporeality, subjectivity, and agency.