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In volatile times it becomes clear that no centre is fixed or permanent. When things fall apart, both crisis and imagination arise. We find ourselves on edge.
It is arts schools and socio-cultural institutions who maintain open spaces for multi-dimensional and divergent thinking – trying to convene shared community spaces.
Polarisation is the collective shift away from communal centres leading to deeper misunderstanding and eroding common values. As a result, institutions that gather and embolden communities through the arts, education, heritage, and social justice can struggle to re-imagine and risk being dismantled.
For this reason, ELIA Biennial Conference 2026 calls on artistic practitioners, researchers, educators, students, administrative staff, technicians and leaders to ‘go off centre’. We ask participants to step out of binary-thinking comfort zones, pull back from the mainstream towards the alternative, break from the fulcrum, and head to the margins. We encourage a rethinking of positions and roles held within these shifting forcefields.
Hosted by ArtEZ University of the Arts, over four days in the city of Zwolle, participants will explore the act and art of decentring and embrace the tension this brings. Through provocative keynotes, paradoxical presentations, imaginative and strategic workshops, cultural tours, and artistic interventions, we will reposition the art school not by restoring a lost centre, but by reforming as a body of knowing1: a living, breathing whole that resists being bricked in by definitions, dogmas, or hierarchies.
With strong and open hearts, we seek to create new and expansive centres of artistic and academic integrity. Join us.
1 Instead of a body of knowledge (as is common in education), a body of knowing is porous. It breathes, doubts, forgets, is vulnerable and mobile. It stands open to voices that are usually not heard, and to ways of knowing that cannot be captured in categories, language, frameworks, or curricula. M.Boumeester, “On the Ontology of Synthetic Desire: The Politics of Recursive Imaging” in Cadernos PROARQ, (Rio de Janeiro: FAU, 2025).
Call for Contributions
Calling all artistic practitioners, performers, philosophers, researchers, educators, students, pedagogues, admin staff, technicians, leaders and makers!
ELIA Biennial 2026 invites you to explore what forms of knowledge, practice, art and paradoxes emerge when we decentre dominant narratives, disrupt habitual hierarchies, and shift our attention toward the marginal, the local, the peripheral.
We welcome contributions that go off centre. Seeking forms of Community, Counterculture, Courage, and Criticality, we look to you for alternative methodologies and modalities, moments of failure and resistance, that move us towards new possibilities of a shared becoming as a body of knowing.
ELIA deeply understands the illuminating capacity of arts education and the idea that the form of a presentation can inspire and inform its content. At the ELIA Biennial 2026, a wide variety of formats are welcome, including academic papers, artistic and performative interventions, creative poster presentations, experiments, and workshops.
Student-Led Contributions
We encourage students to join the conversation at the ELIA Biennial. We welcome student-led contributions that amplify student voices and explore the Biennial theme through the lens of community, courage, criticality, and counterculture. Share your practice, process, and alternative perspectives.
Selected students from ELIA member institutions will receive bursaries covering the cost of travel to and from Zwolle, as well as accommodation for the duration of the event. These bursaries are funded by the ELIA Supporting Members Fund.
Be provocative. Be creative. Your chosen format should stimulate lively debate, enable co-creation, facilitate dialogues, encourage participation and move towards creating a common understanding.
