The call focuses on the former IUVENTA ship, a vessel formerly used for civil sea rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean between 2016 and 2017, during which it assisted over 23,000 people in distress. Seized in 2017 by Italian authorities and left unused in the port of Trapani, the ship has become a powerful material and symbolic site connected to contemporary histories of migration, border politics, and solidarity at sea.
The project invites interdisciplinary proposals from artists, designers, architects, performers, researchers, and collectives to imagine possible futures for the vessel. These may include temporary or long-term transformations of the ship into an artistic, cultural, or participatory space engaging with themes such as migration, maritime memory, ecological transition, decolonial imaginaries, and forms of collective care in the Mediterranean.
The initiative will culminate in a symposium in Siracusa on 3–4 October 2026, where selected participants will present their proposals and contribute to a shared public program.
Application Deadline: 26 July 2026 > Deadline extended: 2 August 2026
For more information, please download and carefully read the call for applications available at the bottom of this page.
Selection Committee
The projects submitted to the Iuventa Open Call will be evaluated by a selection committee composed of the organising teams of MADE Program, Iuventa and Lazy Studio, alongside four guest reviewers whose practices bring diverse perspectives across writing, curating, journalism, art and theatre.
Sofia Baldi Pighi
Sofia Baldi Pighi is an Italian curator and researcher working between Italy and Malta. She is pursuing a practice-based PhD in critical-curatorial studies at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, researching European border regimes and the Central Mediterranean through situated, participatory and curatorial methodologies. Her work explores the intersections of art, migration, law, civic responsibility and public pedagogy. She was Artistic Director and Head Curator of the Malta Biennale 2024 and is curator of Una Boccata d’Arte. She teaches at MADE Program, Academy of Fine Arts in Syracuse, and her current research engages with SOS MEDITERRANEE, Open Arms and the Iuventa case.
César Dezfuli
César Dezfuli is a Spanish-Iranian independent journalist and documentary photographer whose work focuses on migration, identity and human rights. Since 2015, he has documented Europe’s borders, particularly the Central Mediterranean route. In 2016, aboard the rescue vessel Iuventa, he began Passengers, a long-term project following people rescued at sea and tracing their lives in Europe beyond the moment of arrival. His practice combines photography and journalism to challenge anonymous representations of migration. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK, and the Museum of Sydney, Australia, and has been recognised by World Press Photo, the European Press Prize and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
Lauren Markham
Lauren Markham is a California-based writer focusing on migration, climate chaos, and social injustice around the world. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, the critically acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024), and Immemorial. Her essays and journalism regularly appear in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. Lauren has also worked at the intersection of immigration and education for twenty years and helped found a school for immigrant youth in Oakland, California.
Bárbara Santos
Theater director, actor, author, and filmmaker Bárbara Santos is the artistic director of KURINGA theater space in Berlin and the Aesthetics of Solidarity Festival. Founder and reference of the Ma-g-dalena International Network of Teatro de las Oprimidas, which comprises feminist theatre groups from Latin America, Africa and Europe, Santos has developed innovative aesthetic approaches addressing the intersections of gender, race and class and has authored three books on the subject. She played Filomena in The Invisible Life (by Karim Aïnouz), winner of the “Un Certain Regard” Grand Prix at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and made her filmmaking debut in 2023 with the musical Ash Wednesday (30’) at Berlinale. In 2025, she was awarded the title of Doctor by “Notorious Knowledge” (recognition of expertise) by the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil).
Announcement of the Winners
The winners of the Iuventa Open Call will be announced on the MADE website and social media channels by September 3.
All selected winners will also be contacted directly by email.
Artists Selection
The Open Call was conceived from the outset as a call for ideas for the possible future of the IUVENTA, rather than as a production commission for fully developed and immediately executable projects.
The selection process therefore focused on identifying the ideas, perspectives and lines of research that we considered most relevant and promising among the proposals received. We selected five artists and collectives whose perspectives we felt could contribute meaningfully to a broader discussion around the future of the vessel.
At this stage, none of the selected proposals should be understood as a final or executable project, nor as a commitment to its full budget, production model, technical specifications or implementation. Rather, we have chosen to bring these different perspectives and areas of research together around a shared table of discussion.
The selected artists and collectives are:
Coquille Project Group
Francesco Bertelé — [@franz_sella]
Léa Karam — [@loulkm]
Giulio Tonincelli — [@juliustoni]
Niccolò Parigini — [@nikmambotango]
Project: Coquille
Bio: Informal interdisciplinary group formed specifically for the project, with a shared background in civic engagement and work around freedom of movement and borders. Their collaboration developed through the Flamingo Loophole project within the Balkan Rope Project in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The group is formed by Francesco Bertelé, Léa Karam, Giulio Tonincelli and Niccolò Parigini. Their collaboration began years ago while working on the Flamingo Loophole project, part of the Balkan Rope Project in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Through their individual civic and professional paths, they share a commitment to ensuring that passports serve solely as documents guaranteeing freedom of movement for all, rather than as a privilege reserved for the few.
LIMINAL
[@liminal_laboratory]
Project: The IUVENTA Archive
Bio: LIMINAL is a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities and border violence. Based in the University of Bologna’s Department of the Arts, it mobilises strategies of spatial and visual analysis to document and contest the harm created by unequal mobility regimes across multiple geographies and temporalities.
Joanna Österblom / Axa
Project: Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
Bio: Axa, artist name of Joanna Österblom, is a writer and visual artist (MFA, MSocSc). She works with ungovernable text, found materials and conceptual ideas. Currently, Österblom is finalizing the multiyear art project Curated Life, funded by the Kone Foundation, in which she invited artists to live with her in order to explore the shared space created in between the borders of public and private.
Her writings, which happen under a different name, centre around questions of political struggles, disability and forms of life. Österblom’s artistic practice often involves creating and curating both temporary and long-term situations, spaces and connections. By making various artificial social situations, she looks for the precious but fleeting genuineness that they can reveal.
Österblom lives in an artist house in Helsinki close to the shore. She was only six weeks old when she was first brought out to sea, leading to a lifelong love of moving water.
Rita Horta Correia Figueiredo Gaspar
[@ritacorreiagaspar]
Project: Rescuing Memory
Bio: Rita Gaspar (1993, Lisbon) is a designer, artist, researcher and activist, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. After graduating in Communication Design from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 2014, she worked as a designer on artistic and scientific projects before completing a Master’s in Non-Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) in 2025.
Her practice bridges artistic research and political action, exploring intimacy, collectivity, resistance and borders through writing, performance, sensory installations and participatory forms. Grounded in feminist perspectives of care, vulnerability and situated knowledge, she creates spaces where personal stories become felt.
In 2017, she worked in refugee camps in Greece and Turkey and later joined the civil search-and-rescue vessel IUVENTA in the Central Mediterranean. Following her return to Portugal, she co-founded HuBB – Humans Before Borders, an organisation advocating for migrants’ rights and public awareness around migration and European border policies, and co-founded Perene, a collective exploring communal living and collective political practices. She is currently part of the research-based artistic collective TogetherTogether.
Joseph Cochran
[@__joeyjr]
Project: PHAROS
Bio: Joseph Cochran II (b. 1990, Spanish Harlem, New York City) is a New York City-based artist, educator, researcher, publisher, and former legislative director. A survivor of the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and the foster care system, Cochran has concerned himself since the beginning of his practice with systems that determine existence or erasure, and with those fighting for visibility within them.
He makes photographic research projects from sustained presence and access, living within subjects' frameworks and traditions and making the work from mutual experience. This extends to his archival method, in which he builds counter-archives from both the institution and the communities it orbits. The personal projects are in his home of New York City and the mountainous Barbagia of Sardinia; the commissioned investigations in Malta for UNESCO and Heritage Malta, in the Balkans for the European Commission, and in Zimbabwe for the Goethe-Institut. The work takes form as exhibitions, installations, photobooks and community activations, including Dispatches from the Fourth World, a live scripted series. He has exhibited at the Malta Biennale and Palazzo Paternolli in Gorizia, with solo presentations in New York, Brussels and Cologne. He publishes through his imprint Quartermaster Books and organizes through Signal Corps, the social arm of his practice.
Cochran has lectured since 2019, including at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia, and currently the International Center of Photography in New York.
His works are held in the permanent collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Langston Hughes Library, the Evergreen State College in Washington, and the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia.
