making and materiality

Delfina Foundation announces an international open call for its upcoming spring 2026 residency season (26 March to 19 June) under Making and Materiality, a new thematic programme at Delfina Foundation. On this occasion, Delfina Foundation welcomes applications from artists, makers, designers, and those working across these boundaries who seek to explore the critical convergence between craft and contemporary art and engage with what becomes possible when the binary is dissolved.

Making and Materiality is a new residency theme at Delfina Foundation that explores the critical convergence between craft and contemporary art. These practices have often been held apart by institutions, markets, and hierarchies that privilege the autonomous artwork over situated forms of making. Yet this divide has also generated a productive tension, where questions of labour, authorship, value, and cultural memory come sharply into focus.

We situate this residency within the global conversation on materials and making, recognising that craft and experimental processes are inextricable from urgent political and environmental realities. Here, making is understood not as a means to an end, but as a form of knowledge in itself – an active, skilled, and often collaborative process that can evolve in response to a changing world.

This programme brings together artists, makers, designers, and those working across these boundaries to explore what becomes possible when the binary is dissolved. Over three months, 10 to 12 international residents and UK Associates will share Delfina’s Project Space as a site for experimentation, dialogue, and cross-cultural exchange, supported by our wider residency infrastructure. This will be a space for thinking as much as it is for working, where the act of making becomes a shared investigation rather than a route to finished outcomes.