Open Call for Landing Issue 4
Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the
Why Cut When You Can Fade research group
Why Cut When You Can Fade?
On collaborative research through cinema, somatics, and other fields
LANDING invites proposals for our upcoming issue, exploring the politics and poetics of
collaborative practices transcending disciplines. In a time when civility and practices of non-
violent disagreement are in great need, this issue of LANDING poses a question from the
Why Cut When You Can Fade research group to other groups and duos:
What specific protocols can bring about resonant and relational practices with others, and
in particular between arts and other disciplines, keeping collaborations organically
evolving / dissolving?
While our artistic themes and appetitions change and turn over time, the editors of this issue
have a sustained interest in the politics of how we work and based on what worlding-views.
This matters more than media or research tasks, because our values for operating together
can weave a fabric of trust, which in turn allows honesty and vulnerability to become central
to all the relations within a collaborative artistic and research work.
We seek poetic / polemic / essayistic / visual and audiovisual contributions that treat
making together not solely a means to produce outcomes, but as a site of questioning,
entanglement, and walking-talking together—where a pause itself may be called a result.
We’re not questioning whether artistic or scientific or literary etc. outputs are necessary or
relevant; rather, we consider that outcomes should include material, immaterial, and animate
traces, failed moves and inexplicable sensations—in short a multitude of relations.
Who Should Apply
LANDING’s community is focused on contributions from early-stage, doctoral and post-
doctoral researchers, including, but not limited to those working within performance, sound,
choreography, theatre, cinema, visual arts and related fields. We also welcome contributions
from practitioners not affiliated with academic institutions.
In particular, LANDING Issue 4 “Why Cut When You Can Fade” is dedicated to resonant
and diverse practices of inter- or trans-disciplinary groups that:
Combine artistic, scientific, social scientific etc. research methods in ways that
bridge disciplinary distance.
Rely on image-making and somatic media for probing forms, materials, and
gestures, while attempting to meet what is yet unknown.
Approach collaborative work through circularity and degrowth, by rethinking
systems and protocols, choosing materials and methods with less imprint and more
resonance within the living world.
Privilege conversations, human or other-than-human entanglement, and the slow
walk of co-creation, where the “ongoingness” of practice is the work.
We especially welcome contributions that reflect on or enact:
The politics of making—material, relational, temporal, aesthetic, value-laden— by
sharing protocols of how you make art/research together.
Practices that privilege encounter, dialogue, and slowness over fixed results.
Approaches that re-combine text, film, sound, somatic practices, visual or
performative works, by privileging the risks involved in hybrid or open-ended forms.
A poetics of degrowth, unlearning, and reconfiguring protocols of collaboration.
Outlines of methodologies, broadly understood, that can be read, tried out, and
adapted even though they contain elements of not-knowing.
The ethical stakes of collaboration—how responsibility, authority, and care are
distributed and negotiated.
Failure, drift, and unfinished gestures—what happens when collaborative attempts
don’t resolve neatly.
If you’re considering starting a process of collaboration for this call, we suggest
descriptions that focus on: a) the research task the collaboration is setting out to
tackle, but we strongly advise including concrete material artefacts from the
foundational stages of the collaboration.
Short Submission Guidelines
We are looking forward to reading an outline for an original contribution, with relevant
biographical and contextual information. Where is the submission coming from (place, time,
precedents, enablers, ancestors)?
You may interpret “outline” according to your chosen forms, which are detailed in the Full
How to Apply
The deadline for the submission of your outline is June 10th, 2026, 23:59 EET.
By outline we mean a plan of your textual argumentation or flow of thoughts, with
supporting evidence in the form of materials.
Send us one PDF document with all the materials intended for consideration, up to 8 pages
maximum. We will consult this material on a screen, including hyperlinks and multimedia
content. Please begin with a short introductory note inside the PDF that reveals where your
submission is reaching us from, briefly mentioning the origins of the collective work that is
the basis of your transdisciplinary research.
Should you have any questions before sending your outline, we will do our best to respond.
Please send queries by 1st of June.
All communication should be sent to landing@vda.lt (and will be taken care of by Miki
Ambrózy, Sophie Durand and the issue’s guest editors).
About the Editors
Why Cut When You Can Fade? is a research space for conversations, experiments, and
collective gatherings, operating in Lithuania by artist-researchers Miki (Miklós) Ambrózy,
Miglė Križinauskaitė and Greta Grinevičiūtė. We approach collaboration as a way of
slowing down, staying with processes, and resisting extractive or product-driven logics.
Rather than cutting to the point, we ask how a fade—a lingering, porous gesture—can open
space for attention, ethics, and shared authorship. This issue of LANDING extends our
cluster’s work towards publishing, inviting other voices to reflect on how collaboration
reshapes practices, relationships, and outcomes.
LANDING is focused on how practice-based research is done on the ground, in the studio, in
the world, with and through materials and other forms of life. Rather than existing in the
space of theory and speculation, LANDING is focused on the doing of research and its
explicit or tacit methods. It wants to operate as a space of conversation and resource for
fellow practitioners. LANDING wants to imbue encouragement and excitement about the
trajectory of research done by artists, designers, architects; one’s own as well as the
research of others.
Issue 1 of Landing “Edge of the Glacier” and Issue 2 “Extending the Echoes” are publicly
available in the Open Journal System. To support Landing, buy the printed versions.
Publisher
LANDING is a project of the Doctoral Department of Vilnius Academy of Arts. LANDING's publication and human labour is financed by the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The journal is printed at Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishing House (Leidykla) and is available in the open source Open Journal System.
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