Call for Fellows: Tool Sheds

Nieuwe Instituut’s research team proposes Tool Sheds as the focus for this year’s Call for Fellows. This iteration focuses on researching and applying tools, instruments, formats and methods that would help to foster a society that supports all life. Researchers “inhabit” the space of the “Tool Sheds” to test and share tools and applied methodologies, metaphorical or otherwise.  

Using Tool Sheds as a point of departure, this year’s Call for Fellows invites applicants to conceptualise, design and test applied research tools, instruments, methods, formats and processes for generative world-building using material, theoretical, political, time-based or place-based sets of practices.  

By calling for different forms of research, we invite applicants to embrace embodied forms of knowing, learning and investigating, and to think more deeply about the relationship between theory and practice. Nieuwe Instituut and its Research collective are currently engaged in imagining how museums and cultural institutions could function as “testing grounds”: equitable sites for action-based forms of research with the aim of enacting a society that supports all life, while at the same time investigating how to approach and situate “research as testing” within the role of a cultural institution.   

The Tool Shed is one of the Research team’s concepts for public interfacing, through which research can engage and interact with various publics. We offer our own tools, while also leaving the metaphorical doors of the Tool Shed open for others outside the Nieuwe Instituut to contribute and share their own.  

The Tool Shed’s aim is to act as a node through which projects and collaborations between various publics and the Research team can be facilitated and developed at the threshold of the institution—by drawing on and contributing to already existing tools and methodologies, or by proposing others.  

The Tool Shed aims to hold fluid, flexible, and multi-disciplinary research tools and methodologies for material, theoretical, political, time-based or place-based sets of practices. It also facilitates their accessibility through acts of neighbourly borrowing—between researchers, disciplines and ambitions, and between the Nieuwe Instituut and various publics. A Tool Shed is not necessarily a neat and sufficient collection of instruments, perfectly suited to their well-defined tasks; rather, it is a place to rummage around, to find unsought alternatives, to learn and mix skills.    

This open call invites applicants to contribute to the Research team’s Tool Sheds as sites for knowledge sharing, or to propose possible connections with the applicant’s own action-based and applied research Tool Sheds, networks and practices.   

About the Research Fellowships
Since its foundation in 2013, Nieuwe Instituut has carried out and supported research in architecture, design and digital culture. Exhibitions, lectures, archival investigations and publications have served as outputs of research, but more importantly as active platforms for its development. Nieuwe Instituut’s Fellowship Programme has a fundamental role in these platforms. Intended as a means of supporting and learning from a variety of research initiatives and methodologies, the fellowship is ultimately an opportunity to rehearse other modes of thinking and doing. Nieuwe Instituut’s Research team proposes Tool Sheds as the focus for this year’s call for fellows. 

Nieuwe Instituut offers two Research Fellowship positions for six months (from January 2024 to June 2024). Each of these positions includes a maximum budget of 20,000 euros. Stipends may be subject to a withholding tax.  

Fellows will have daily access to the facilities of the Nieuwe Instituut, including the library, archives, exhibitions, workspaces and presentation spaces. Other resources may be available in concert with other departments of Nieuwe Instituut as well as with its institutional partners.

For more information about the Nieuwe Instituut's Call for Fellows, visit here. Applications are open from June 19 until September 10, 2023.