SOMA Summer 2026

SOMA Summer is a four-week summer school conducted in English that weaves together theoretical inquiry, artistic practice, and the discussion of contemporary global issues. Held in Mexico City, the program is designed for artists, writers, curators, scholars, and other cultural practitioners who seek to go beyond comfort zones in order to broaden their disciplinary perspectives, encounter positions different from their own, and revisit their creative processes.

Each edition is framed by a specific theme that serves as a point of departure for fostering processes of mutual listening, dialogue, and collective learning. The faculty is composed of both Mexican and international artists and scholars who, through seminars, lectures, group critiques, portfolio reviews, workshops, and studio visits, promote a horizontal exchange of knowledge among a multiplicity of perspectives and practices.

SOMA Summer 2026: Towards a Planetary Consciousness for Hyper-Mediated Times
We are living in a time traversed by multiple crises whose brutality is, for many, not new. However, rapid developments in media technologies, the intensification of social media use, and the escalating scale of climate-change-induced disasters have increased global awareness around this in unprecedented ways. At the same time, borders are being fortified, and divisions between those who experience those crises to an extreme and those who are not are becoming stronger, often justified in the name of risk management and the promise of “certainty” and “security.” At a moment when minds, bodies, territories and even time itself are increasingly organized through forms of separation, borderization, and restriction, SOMA Summer 2026 asks: How can we move towards a future that communes instead of divides— and also envision a politics of the Earth?

Borderization operates not only through physical fortifications, but also through computational strategies and algorithms. It acts within a media regime that hooks us on instants. It works through montages that sever the connections between presents, pasts, and futures, obscuring shared grounds. Each day, according to predicted preferences, we are offered curated sequences on our personal screens: celebrity recipes, images from art exhibitions, graphic depictions of violence, and cute animals. All appear together within the same temporal stream. 

With our attention moving from one instant to the next, how do these flickers of varying degrees of urgency affect our sensibilities and contribute to the fragmentation of our minds and of the larger collective? As the perception of our realities disperses, we search for quick solutions and immediate answers becoming consumable identities that serve as the new raw material of the day. 

In this context, how can we restore the memories that are being erased and re-hack the extraction of our minds in order to build futures that are not mere repetitions of dysfunctional pasts? How can we organize movements that foster cohesion rather than separation and that are grounded in an awareness of our planetary entanglements with other earthly communities? The program asks which other nature intelligences—beyond the “us-and-them binary”—we might look to for clues on how to move toward more congruent realities in which all actors of life on Earth are recognised as valid agents. 

Drawing on a wide spectrum of thinkers, artists, and theorists—and particularly Achille Mbembe’s concept of borderization and the notion of planetary entanglement—SOMA Summer 2026 will approach the planetary as a politics of life and a politics of Earth. During the program, we will explore contemporary media regimes, politics, and technologies. We will also engage in critical analyses of the various tools through which borderization operates, and examine how resistance and collaboration can take place at a moment when strategies of collectivity are being co-opted to generate division in service of control and financial growth. 

Over the course of four weeks, the program, conducted in English and convened by Sara Eliassen (artist and filmmaker, Norway) Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa (curator and art historian, Cuba) and Yoshua Okón (artist, Mexico), will bring together a group of artists and thinkers for collective and critical speculation on what planetary consciousness could look like at this historical juncture. It will serve as a hub for discursive and practical exercises such as seminars and lectures, artist-led workshops, group critiques, portfolio reviews, collective discussions, and studio and site visits informed by theoretical and artistic perspectives from both local and international practices. Participants and tutors will collectively inquire into ways of imagining a world-scale interconnection that accounts for territories, communities, and temporalities beyond borderization.

Who should apply
SOMA Summer has upheld curiosity and debate as core pedagogical principles for expanding critical imagination, enriching creative processes, and strengthening collective forms of learning. The program welcomes applications from artists, writers, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners whose practices resonate with the program’s theme and who are open to critical engagement, dialogue, and horizontal exchange.

Apply: use the online platform to complete your application. Contact: ssummer@somamexico.org. More information about SOMA Summer 2026.