The deadline for applications for IMPACT25 was 2 July 2025 (23:59 CET). Applications for IMPACT25 are closed now. All complete applications will be considered. Applicants will be informed about the outcome of their decision by e-mail in mid-July 2025.

Contact
Juliane Beck
impact@pact-zollverein.de

When artistic practice engages with social realities, it reveals its particular strength: it is always both a part of the present day and a utopian force that reaches into the sphere of the imaginable.

In times of deepening inequality, narrow discourses and authoritarian attacks on democratic achievements, there is a need for spaces in which counterstrategies can be developed and tested, affects negotiated, and complex perspectives made visible. Art creates spaces of resonance for practices of resistance, repair, and reworlding, in order to challenge dominant narratives and foreground personal ideas of belonging and the future.

How can art be used as a tool that we can literally take into our own hands? Which models for resistant practices exist and can be shared with others? Is it possible to build bridges between places, resources, and existing infrastructures in order to form connections in novel ways?

IMPACT25 sees itself as a transdisciplinary symposium for strategies for dealing with the future. This is where practices and blueprints from the arts, sciences, urban space, architecture and other fields of research come together. 

This year’s edition unfolds in two phases: the first two days will be open to the public, inter alia with brief presentations of the selected invited projects, followed by two days of closed sessions devoted to the exchange of ideas. Details of the public programme will be online shortly.

This call for proposals welcomes projects that are rooted in artistic, scientific, social, activist or technological fields and whose authors would like to engage in open exchange with other international participants regarding their respective approaches.