Open Call – Cache: Narrations of Times and Territories

Cache: Narrations of Times and Territories is a six-month research and production lab organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art. The program brings together a Research Lab and a Production Lab that run in parallel, with moments of intersection across their duration. It is open to artists, cultural practitioners, and creatives from different disciplines. 

The project falls under Medrar’s MedRX Portal, a long-term programme that champions counter-narratives that reimagine our world. Launched in 2021 and building on Medrar’s experience with Open Lab Egypt (2009–2014), MedRX focuses on practices working across new media and technologically mediated forms, including XR and immersive technologies. It aims to bridge alternative artistic research and production through labs, workshops, exchanges, lectures, exhibitions, and events.

Conceptual Framework

Every process leaves something behind. Chemical residue. Digital cache. Urban dust. Unformulated citations. Genealogical echo. Narrative fossils. The remnants of erasures, transformations, and systemic shifts carry histories and unrealized possibilities that are often treated like waste. But what if residues are not failures of a system, but its most honest condition? What if you take a buffer or some rubble and let them propel you somewhere you have never been?

The cache is a place for things that are meant to disappear. It is where systems stash what they do not carry in the open yet cannot fully discard. Peripheral, temporary, designed to be overwritten – yet persisting. Like a backup nobody asked for, a sediment that was never meant to settle.

Taking the cache as both a technological and epistemological condition, the programme questions the assumption that new media is weightless – existing only at the interface, the screen, the seamless experience. Traces move to peripheries, compress into artifacts, or linger as ghost data. Cache reorients this to account for time, history, knowledge and social and material conditions as integral to how we think about contemporary media, engaging temporality, historical sensibility, and marginality. It gravitates toward ruins, incomplete forms, and unresolved interpretation, alongside an awareness of history as both presence and rupture.

The Labs work with four intersecting registers:

– Conditions of Residue

What accumulates when no one is watching?

This line of inquiry engages with interrupted memories (personal or collective), fragments of failed infrastructures, archival erasures, digital decay, ecological residue, and everyday breakdown.

– Knowledge Assembly

How do we piece together what we know from fragments?

Here, we approach knowledge as non-linear – constructed through accumulation, assembled from partial connections, drawing from the grammar of time and situated in lived realities.

– Speculative Temporalities 

Can a corrupted file be a site of departure?

Speculation is a method for engaging the present sideways: re-situating incomplete and unofficial objects, data, and systems across alternative timelines and unfinished histories. 

– Ideology of the Medium 

Every medium was once new, introducing its own apparatus, its own way of seeing, storing, and relating. We treat the apparatus as a two-way street. It is the residue of that encounter, between gesture and tool, situated across times and territories, that we are interested in. 

Program Structure

The program is structured around two parallel tracks: a Research Lab and a Production Lab running simultaneously over a six-month period. While each track operates with a distinct focus, they intersect at key moments through shared sessions, discussions, and public formats.

– Research Lab

The Research Lab brings together artists, writers, researchers, and practitioners to develop conceptual approaches and research questions related to the program’s themes. It operates through a combination of workshops, readings, discussions, and collective sessions.

The Research Lab will result in a set of research outputs, which may take the form of texts, experimental formats, or collective presentations.

– Production Lab

The Production Lab supports a group of selected artists in developing works over the duration of the program, as part of the framework of the program. Participants engage in studio-based practice, technical experimentation, and mentorship. This phase includes access to workspaces, equipment, and technical support, alongside collective feedback sessions.

The lab focuses on practices working across new media and technologically mediated forms,  including but not limited to  XR, immersive technologies, expanded cinema, sonic works, and related forms, while remaining open to material and hybrid approaches. Artists are expected to develop projects that engage technology both as a formal language and as a conceptual framework, responding to the program’s themes through these expanded conditions.

– Final Presentation

The program will conclude with a collective presentation of the works and research developed throughout its duration, including a publication, an exhibition, and a series of public engagement formats.

Timeline:

– Application deadline: Monday, 25 May 2026, 11:59 PM Cairo time

– Interviews: first week of June 2026

– Results announcement: second week of June 2026

– Program duration: June – December 2026

– Final presentation: January – February 2027

What does the program offers:

– Mentorship and guidance throughout the program

– Access to studio space and shared working facilities

– Technical support and consultation sessions

– Access to equipment and production resources

– Production grants to support selected projects

– Participation fee upon completion of the program requirements

– Workshops, reading sessions, and collective discussions

– Opportunities for exchange between Research and Production Lab participants

– Public and semi-public presentation opportunities (exhibition, publication, and public engagement formats)

Guidelines:

– The call is open to Egyptian and Arab nationals artists, writers, researchers, and cultural practitioners working across different disciplines and interested in engaging with the program’s themes.

 – Applicants must be based in Cairo at the time of application and the program duration. 

 – Intended for early-career artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners. “Early-career” refers to individuals who have established an independent practice and are in a phase of active development, beyond the initial stages of their careers.Typically, this includes those with 2–10 years of professional experience following their artistic or academic education. This range is indicative rather than prescriptive, and age is not a determining factor.

– Prior technical experience is not required. However, familiarity with any tools, media, or research methodologies relevant to the applicant’s practice is encouraged.

– The working languages of the program are Arabic and English

– Selection will be based on the relevance of the proposal to the program’s themes, as well as the clarity of the applicant’s approach.

– To apply, applicants must complete the application form and submit all required materials. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

Commitments of Selected Participants

– Participants are expected to have access to a personal laptop or any tools necessary to support their work throughout the program.

– Participants may work individually or collaboratively.

– Participants are expected to commit to the full duration of the program.

– Participants are expected to attend all program activities, including workshops, sessions, discussions, and collective meetings.

– The program requires a time commitment of approximately 2–3 days per week.

– Participants are expected to actively engage in the development of their research or project throughout the program.

– Participants are expected to follow through with the development and implementation of their work until completion.

– Participants are expected to contribute to group discussions, feedback sessions, and collective formats.

– Participants are expected to participate in the final presentation, including exhibition, publication, and public engagement formats.

Application process

Application form: https://forms.gle/hUsEx4rP2hcuQA137

The application will include:

1) Personal data (full name, date and place of birth, copy of an ID or passport, email, phone number).

2) Brief biography specifying the applicant’s main lines of research (up to 500 characters).

3) CV (2-3 pages).

4) Project proposal, including:

– Title

– Summary of the proposal

– Motivations for joining the program

– Relationship with proposed thematic focus

– Possible ways to present the project or research publicly, open to develop over the course of the Labs.

5) Portfolio (up to 3 previous works/projects)

6) Additional and supporting material that supports your application, providing further context to your practice or proposal.

Curatorial Team:

Raneem Elhaddad, Shorouk El Hariry, Mohamed Abdelkarim

Guests and Contributors:

Afrotecha.urban: afrotecha.urban is an applied research project at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Our transdisciplinary team investigates multiple curiosities of how youth are using technologies in African cities to live, work, play, make, organise, and connect. These curiosities have been applied through collaboratively curated, youth-run, ‘labs-not-labs’* in Cape Town, Durban, Nairobi and Cairo. Each ‘not-lab’ takes on a situated life, exploring key themes in context co-produced with embedded collectives and harnessing what we call amoebic thinking.

afrotecha.cairo foregrounds how Cairo’s youth as early career and emerging artists, tap into residues as entry points, tracing the histories of technology and charting speculative futures in flux. Through the tools of new media and contemporary arts, we surface alternative knowledge on urban materialities between the human and non-human. In the lab we will speculate what occurs through the residual leftover, seen as aftermath interactions with the periphery, and observe possibilities of emergence and renewal.

https://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/afrotecha-urban/  https://www.africancentreforcities.net/

Dina Jereidini (multidisciplinary artist), Shehab Ismail (historian), Mostafa Elbaroody (artist and architect), Marwan Fayed (artist, architect and researcher), Mena El Shazly (visual artist), Mohammed Ezzeldin (historian).