Application deadline: November 1, 2025
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to announce the launch of Agora: A Gathering of Art and Philosophy. This fully-funded online program is designed to confront the challenges of our time by combining two disciplines uniquely capable of reimagining the future: art and philosophy. The Call for Applications is open from now until November 1st, 2025.
Conceived by Andrea Bellini and Federico Campagna, Agora will offer semester-long free programs of English-language lectures, seminars, and one-on-one mentoring to a group of eight practicing artists and philosophers from January to April. The lectures will subsequently be made available for free on the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s digital platform, the 5th floor, and will also find resonance across Mousse Magazine’s digital channels, opening the dialogue to the broader public.
Each participant will receive a stipend, in order to guarantee equal access. All classes will be held online, so that participants from around the globe may take part. In addition to lectures and seminar-style discussions, students will also develop their personal work in private meetings with the lecturers.
“With Agora, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève introduces a new idea of the museum as a public space: free lectures by world-acclaimed thinkers and practitioners, stipends for participating students, and a yearlong colloquium of philosophers, curators, and artists,” said Agora’s co-founder and director, philosopher Federico Campagna. “We are delighted to be creating a new home for the next generation of world builders,” he said.
Lecturers will include Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Jaar, Jota Mombaça, Nora N. Khan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Laura U. Marks, Hito Steyerl, and John Tresch. These internationally renowned thinkers and art practitioners will also accompany the students in seminars and one-on-one sessions, encouraging them to probe prevailing contemporary worldviews and forge new avenues for the imagination.
The lectures will be grouped into three main areas of inquiry: Technologies of Consciousness, Materialities, and Social Imagination. Agora’s aim is to combine philosophical investigations with the perspectives of marginalized groups, the urgency of developing a new environmental consciousness, and the technical challenges posed by art practice. Fiercely committed to opening artistic discourse to pluralistic views of the world, the expert talks and tutorials will explore “post-contemporary” visions of the future, a future in which art takes a leading role in reshaping the realm of what is imaginable, possible, or necessary.
“The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is thrilled to launch this free online cultural program, which builds on the hundreds of videos, artist interviews, and podcasts on art, philosophy, music, and literature that we’ve already shared with the public through our digital platform, the 5th floor,” says the Centre’s director and Agora’s co-founder Andrea Bellini. “Open to artists and art lovers worldwide, Agora will be a vibrant new space for imagining, sharing, and creating contemporary culture and art.”
After the student cohort has completed the program, Agora’s archive of lectures will be made available to the public at no cost via the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s digital platform, the 5th floor.
Agora’s initial horizon will be for three years, with new groups of students selected every winter. Agora encourages candidates with intriguing records of artistic practice and philosophical creativity to apply to the program, especially from candidates with demonstrated practice in the visual arts, film, dance, performance art, theater, music, architecture, and design or with research practice in philosophy. Applications will be assessed on the basis of the candidate’s previous work and letter of motivation. Academic qualifications are not required.
Selected participants will be announced in mid-December 2025, with classes and tutorials running from early January to mid-April 2026.
Candidates for the inaugural cohort have until November 1st, 2025 to apply.
Apply here.
