Art Encounters Foundation and Cluj Cultural Centre announce the open call for the 8th edition of the Unschool of Curating.
19–26 June 2026 – Timișoara and Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Application deadline: 23 April 2026 (EET)
Notification of results: 4 May 2026
Led by curator Antonia Alampi, this year’s edition explores Repair as Method as a working approach in curatorial practice. The programme offers emerging curators an international platform for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and learning, grounded in the artistic contexts of both cities.
Structured across Timișoara (19–23 June) and Cluj (23–26 June), the programme includes lectures, working sessions, visits, and meetings with artists and curators, as well as two public events.
This edition proposes “repair” not as a moral slogan but as a working method for curatorial practice. In a cultural landscape shaped by acceleration, fragmentation, precarity, and asymmetrical access to resources, curating often risks reproducing the very dynamics it seeks to critique. Extraction of context. Instrumentalization of communities. Reinvention for the sake of visibility. Exhaustion disguised as productivity.
This edition of the Unschool asks: what would it mean to approach curatorial work as an act of repair?
Repair of relations between institutions and communities.
Repair of cultural memory and its silences.
Repair of communal life fractured by individualization.
Repair of methodologies that consume more than they contribute.
Antonia Alampi
Is a curator and cultural organizer from Southern Italy, based in Berlin. She is the founding Artistic Director of Spore Initiative, a platform exploring cultural practices and knowledge systems rooted in eco-social justice, community collaboration, and intergenerational learning.
Her work spans exhibitions, public and educational programmes, and long-term collaborations, often within small-scale, socially engaged institutions. She was previously Artistic Co-Director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and has held curatorial positions at Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp and Beirut in Cairo.
Her practice reflects on how cultural work can support shared forms of knowledge, strengthen cultural ecologies, and cultivate relationships between communities and their environments.
Who can apply
Participation is free of charge and open to emerging curators with at least 3 years of experience.
The programme is conducted in English, and full in-person attendance is required.
Open internationally. | Romanian curators are strongly encouraged to apply.
What to expect
Intensive sessions with Antonia Alampi
Talks, visits, and workshops with guest speakers
Encounters with the local scenes in Cluj and Timișoara
Two public events in Timișoara and Cluj
What is covered by the organizers
accommodation costs for the sessions scheduled in Timișoara and Cluj, in double rooms
transport costs from Timișoara to Cluj
two collective dinners throughout the programme
The application form includes the following
personal information about the applicant
short reflective responses on your practice, motivations, and relation to the programme’s theme
short summary of a topic or an exhibition theme applicants are currently researching
a short resume (max. 3 pages)
For questions, feel free to contact us at school.curating@gmail.com.
Foto: Fundația Art Encounters
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