Art, Science, and the Otherworldly: A Call for Short-Form Essays on Collaborative Ways of Knowing the Environment

Some landscapes seem almost to belong to another world: the deep ocean, polar ice, deserts, caves, wetlands, volcanic terrain, subterranean ecosystems, and other environments whose scales, conditions, or forms of life resist ordinary human perception.

Science gives us ways to measure and describe these places—to trace chemical processes, map geological formations, identify species, reconstruct histories, and observe transformations occurring beyond the reach of our senses. Art can make other dimensions perceptible: duration, atmosphere, movement, texture, uncertainty, relation, and experiences that resist easy translation into data.

What happens when these ways of knowing are brought together?

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC invites proposals for short-form, image-rich essays exploring collaborations between artists and scientists working in unusual, remote, extreme, or otherwise difficult-to-know environments.

We are particularly interested in contributions grounded in shared fieldwork or sustained collaboration: artists accompanying scientists into the field; scientists becoming participants in artistic processes; or projects in which artistic and scientific methods have become sufficiently entangled that it is difficult to say where observation ends and interpretation begins.

Rather than simply presenting scientific research alongside an artistic response to it, the essays should ask what becomes possible through the encounter between the two. What can an artist notice that scientific protocols might leave outside the frame? What can scientific instruments allow an artist to perceive that the human senses cannot? How might measurement, observation, documentation, imagination, and aesthetic practice alter one another when they are used to investigate the same place?

We welcome proposals concerned with environments including, but by no means limited to:

• deserts and arid landscapes
• the Arctic, sub-Arctic, and other ice environments
• deep-ocean and coastal ecosystems
• caves and subterranean environments
• wetlands, bogs, and other liminal landscapes
• volcanic and geothermal environments
• microscopic, microbial, or otherwise difficult-to-perceive ecosystems

The resulting pieces should be short-form essays accompanied by photographs, artworks, field images, diagrams, maps, or other visual material emerging from the collaboration. We are especially interested in essays that allow readers to encounter the process of inquiry itself: the instruments, observations, conversations, uncertainties, mistakes, discoveries, and moments of wonder through which an unfamiliar environment gradually becomes more legible—while perhaps remaining strange.

Who should apply

This call is open to artists based in the United States and Canada whose work involves meaningful collaboration with scientists or scientific researchers in the field. We welcome practitioners working across photography, film, sound, visual art, performance, installation, writing, and interdisciplinary forms.

Selected contributors will receive a USD $2,500 stipend to develop the essay and accompanying visual material for publication by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC.

How to apply

Please submit:

• a 300–500 word proposal describing the environment, collaboration, and central question or idea you would explore;
• a CV or short biography;
• a brief description of the visual material that would accompany the essay; and
• links to relevant previous work, where applicable.

Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Because we aim to publish the completed series on our website by early September 2026, early submissions are strongly encouraged.

We are not looking simply for illustrations of scientific findings or artworks inspired by nature. We are interested in something more reciprocal: projects in which art and science change what—and how—we are able to experience our world.

Email Brendan O’Donnell, Program Director Climate & Environment, at  brendan.odonnell[at]us.boell.org with questions.