SOMA Summer 2026: Four-Week Artist Program
International summer school in Mexico City exploring planetary consciousness through art, theory, and collective practice. Application deadline: March 15, 2026.
SOMA Summer 2026 is a four-week intensive summer program held in Mexico City, designed for artists, writers, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners seeking to expand their perspectives and revisit their creative processes. The program theme, "Towards a Planetary Consciousness for Hyper-Mediated Times," draws on Achille Mbembe's concept of borderization and planetary entanglement to explore contemporary media, politics, and technologies. Conducted in English and convened by Sara Eliassen (Norway), Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa (Cuba), and Yoshua Okón (Mexico), the program brings together international and local faculty for collective critical speculation. Activities include seminars and lectures, artist-led workshops, group critiques, portfolio reviews, collective discussions, and studio/site visits around Mexico City. Featured artists and thinkers include Paloma Contreras, Fritzia Irizar, Metahaven, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, and Achille Mbembe. Participants will explore forms of world-scale interconnection accounting for territories, communities, and temporalities beyond borderization processes. Weekly portfolio reviews with local contemporary art professionals are included. The program emphasizes horizontal exchange of knowledge and mutual listening among diverse perspectives.