Open Call Wetlab 2025/2026

Open call for residencies at Hangar’s Wetlab (1 year).
Deadline for applications: until January 31, 2025 at 11:59 pm.
Places available: 2
Duration of the residency: from April 2025 to March 2026.
Result of the selection: end of February 2025.
Access to Wetlab, programs and services: €80 per month (VAT included).
Deposit: €80 to be returned at the end of the stay.

Presentation

Hangar is a center that maintains (that is, it generates, updates, revises, repairs and sustains) the necessary conditions to facilitate artistic production and research, understanding them as practices and forms of critical speculation capable of responding to contemporary debates and urgencies. Hangar functions as an ecosystem made up of tools, spaces, diverse ways of carrying out accompaniments, programs and calls, but above all, made up of those who inhabit or participate in it.

The Wetlab is a Hangar space where hybrid, unconventional practices take place, destabilizing and adding complexity to the established boundaries between sciences and arts from a transhackfeminist perspective. It is a laboratory for material experimentation born from DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others) culture, where responsible autonomy and creative collaboration are essential. The Wetlab also hosts workshops, talks and research visits. Its intention is to enable artists, scientists and different social agents to meet, and to promote the development of open tools that facilitate knowledge transference. The Wetlab’s resident agents are thought as catalysts of material research processes capable of establishing a conceptual and practical interrelation with the center, generating learning communities around their field of work.

Hangar opens the call for two working tables in the Wetlab for a period of one year, with the possibility of extending them for two more years.

To whom it is addressed

This call is addressed to artists and researchers (individual or collective) from any field involved in cultural or scientific contexts, who are interested in practical research processes, DIY and DIWO, and working around living materials and the critical intersection between science and art. Both artists and scientists working individually or collectively, without nationality restriction, are eligible to use the Wetlab. Travel expenses, accommodation in Barcelona and the access fee to the Wetlab, programs and services will be paid by the person or collective that carries out the residency. Previous knowledge of the specific tools and materials used in a scientific laboratory environment, as well as standard scientific techniques and procedures, is essential.

Tables, spaces for daily use and shared resources

The Wetlab is an enclosed space located inside Hangar’s Polivalent Room. It is a living space in constant mutation, interdependent of the agents that inhabit it. The Wetlab is not a conventional laboratory, nor does it want to be. It is open to transformation and accumulates the material history of its previous residents. It is equipped with laboratory tools, most of them recovered from other currently inactive laboratories, a central shared work table, and three individual work tables: two for resident artists and scientists, and another one reserved for possible research stays, institutional exchanges or specific work programs.

Each Wetlab resident has his or her own table and chair, shared scientific instruments and tools, electrical outlet, internet connection and heating (a new air conditioning system is planned for the next renovation).

Other shared facilities include kitchen, showers and toilets.

Access to the workshop is open 24/7/365.

Shared resources include:

1. Free use of tools such as the Digital Image and Video Lab, Hangar Rooms (Antiguas Oficinas, Ricson and Polivalent rooms) and audiovisual material rental. All these spaces and shared tools are subject to reservation and availability procedure in order to guarantee, precisely, this shared use.
2- Free advice on issues related to project production (production planning, budget preparation and management, etc.). Hangar has three laboratories (Construction, Interaction & Soft/hardware, and Interfaces and Networks) that are available to residents in the form of a bank of free hours. The remaining hours are billed at a very low rate.
3- Free consultancies once a week in the framework of Open Thursdays in the Hangar labs and with the resident collectives.
4- Free access to the activities that take place in Hangar.
5- Dissemination of artistic practice and processes, integrating them into Hangar’s communication project and publications.
6- Calls for production and research grants.

Commitments of the scientists/artists-in-residence

– Promote transdisciplinary methodologies, not yet explored, that incorporate questions and ways of doing that are not directly related to the visual arts.
– Research and creation in the critical intersection between scientific and artistic practices.
– Increase the capacities of Hangar’s environment and the communities that inhabit it.
– Generate and nurture learning communities around their field of work.

Application Process

The application will be sent in PDF format to the email ariadna(at)hangar.org with the subject “Convocatoria Wetlab Hangar 2025”.

The document must contain:

1. Personal data (Full name, date and place of birth, ID or passport, e-mail, telephone contact).
2. Curriculum vitae (2500 characters maximum, spaces included).
3. Motivation letter (3000 characters maximum, spaces included). The letter has to address, among other things that the candidates consider appropriate:
– What singular intersections between science and art interest you?
– Why Hangar’s Wetlab? That is, how does scientific or artistic practice find in the Wetlab a specific and suitable context, and how can it be linked to the lines of research, and to other communities of practice that inhabit the center.
4. Graphic dossier of a selection of projects (up to a maximum of 5 works; technical data sheets, images, texts, corresponding links, etc.).
5. Personal web URL, if any.

Selection process

The selection process is carried out through an open call to any scientist, artist or collective, without restrictions of age, origin or legal form. The application must be made telematically. The selection process will be in charge of Hangar’s Stable Jury, Ariadna Guiteras (Residencies Coordinator) and Antonio Gagliano (Responsible for contexts and research programs).

The selection committee reserves the right to leave some of the vacancies vacant.

Evaluation criteria

– Interest, consistency and singularity of the research.
– Links with Hangar’s practices, communities, and threads of research.
– Generation of critical areas around experimentation with biopractices and living materials.
– Prior knowledge of laboratory instruments and standard scientific methodologies.
– Submission of all documents and materials requested by the call, in the requested format and with the indicated extension.

Deadline for submission of applications: until January 31, 2025 at 11:59 p.m.
Resolution: End of February 2025
Start of residency: April 2025

For more information and to send applications:
Ariadna Guiteras
+34 93 308 40 41
ariadna(at)hangar.org