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scopio Magazine Architecture, Art and Image

OPEN CALL | DRAWING AND PHOTOGRAPHY INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT (DPIC) | 2026

 

I. Call for entries | Coming soon (June - October 2026)

We live in a time marked by instability: migrations, evictions, ruptures where belonging collapses and permanence dissolves. This is the tension of our present. Yet, it is also a radical chance to unlearn, to disturb certainties, to shift how we see and inhabit.

In DPIC 2026, (Dis)Placement becomes an act of imagination, grounding utopian thinking as a critical method for reading the present. We seek images that do not merely record movement, but provocations that actively reposition the way we read space, opening fragile possibilities within unstable grounds.

We invite students, emerging architects, artists and visual thinkers to take part in DPIC 2026, which this year explores the theme (Dis)Placement. Participants are encouraged to begin reflecting on the questions that will shape this edition.

This open call welcomes exploratory works that reflect on contemporary space and the images through which we understand it. Through drawing, photography or other visual forms, participants are invited to observe, question and interpret spatial conditions, sharing perspectives that reveal new ways of seeing and imagining our built environment. Projects may emerge from individual explorations or from ongoing work developed within design studios or related courses, and the theme may also serve as a starting point for discussion and experimentation within academic contexts.

Submissions should consist of a visual diptych accompanied by a short manifesto text. The diptych - composed of two images - may take the form of drawings, photographs, collages or other visual formats that together express an idea, question or position related to (Dis)Placement. The manifesto should briefly articulate the intention behind the images, giving voice to the participant’s perspective behind their work.

Dare to treat uncertainty not as a tragedy to document, but as a force to examine and reconfigure. Dream of new grounds, not as fantasy, but as critical gesture. Show us images that unsettle where we stand and disobey inherited readings of belonging.

As David Bowie once said : "Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming". So, can you hear it?

 

II. About | DPIC 2026

DPIC 2026 is more than a contest. It is a space of encounter, and a call to (re)imagine. A stage where photography and drawing break free from mere representation and become instruments of thought, resistance, action and transformation.

Here, image is a statement, a challenge, a fragment of a reality yet to come. Each edition opens a door to Academia, creating an experimental and radical ground where we can glimpse what new generations are thinking, questioning, imagining, and creating. DPIC 2026 exists to disturb what we take for granted, to question how we see, and to suggest new ways of inhabiting the present and the future. It is a classroom without walls, where every image carries the potential to teach us something about how we currently live, and how we might live otherwise. DPIC 2026 invites you to disobey and transgress, to dream and to idealize, to critique and disrupt.


III. Theme | (Dis)Placement

Following previous editions centred on Utopia and Visual Spaces of Change, DPIC 2026 repositions utopia not as an ideal future, but as a critical method for reading the present. This year, it shifts its focus towards the condition of (Dis)Placement as a defining spatial and cultural reality of our time. (Dis)Placement exceeds physical movement. It refers to the instability of belonging and the transformation of territories, identities and institutions. 

This year's theme exposes the mechanisms that produce attachment and exclusion, visibility and invisibility across contemporary landscapes. At the same time, it opens space for alternative imaginaries that are critical, provisional, speculative and transformative. It becomes a position from which to question how space is lived, negotiated and contested.

DPIC 2026 invites participants to engage with (Dis)Placement as both condition and catalyst, generating new spatial interpretations:

  • How do architecture and space register, absorb and reflect structural shifts?
  • How do images expose hidden structures of transition, permanence or exclusion?
  • How can visual practice move beyond documentation and articulate alternative propositions?

Here, (Dis)Placement is not a condition to be lamented but a threshold of possibility, a moment that challenges us to rethink belonging, identity and spatial futures. Beyond representation, we seek works capable of shifting perception and displacing the viewer, revealing how space is continually negotiated and reimagined.

DPIC 2026 calls on you to imagine beyond certainty and to confront the instability of the present with clarity and precision. The diptych format becomes a device of tension between presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, rupture and projection, documentation and speculation. Bring us images that reposition how we understand the ground beneath us. 

 

IV. Curatorial Constellations

Without limiting interpretation, submissions may resonate with one or more of the following lines of inquiry:

  • (Dis)Placement as Rupture (eviction, institutional fracture, structural instability)
  • (Dis)Placement as Invisibility (erasure, marginalisation, hidden infrastructures)
  • (Dis)Placement as Reconfiguration (transformation, adaptation, spatial negotiation)
  • (Dis)Placement as Method (gestures that actively unsettle representation itself)

 

V. What to Submit?

Diptych (Drawing | Photography)

Participants must submit a conceptual diptych (two images in dialogue). The two images should establish tension, continuity or rupture:

  • before / after
  • document / speculation
  • absence / projection
  • visible / invisible
  • stability / instability
  • belonging / exclusion
  • etc

Text (Manifesto)

Each submission must include a short text (max. 300 words) in the form of a manifesto. 

 

VI. Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated according to:

  • Conceptual strength and critical engagement
  • Coherence between images and text
  • Capacity to propose alternative spatial imaginaries
  • Formal and visual clarity

 

VII. Awards

Selected works will be:

  • Published in Scopio Magazine
  • Potentially included in a collective exhibition
  • Solidarity Edition

Selected work may be featured in a limited edition of printed objects (e.g. tote bags), with proceeds  potentially donated to an Association addressing issues related to (Dis)Placement and housing rights.

 

VIII. Dissemination

Results will be announced through:

  • Scopio digital platforms
  • Social media
  • Public presentation event
  • Integration within the printed volume

 

Full call details and submission guidelines will be released in June 2026.