The African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) invites South African based writers, artists, theorists, video-makers, choreographers, theatre-makers and animators to apply for African Cosmotechnics, a five-day intensive workshop in Cape Town, January 26 – 31, 2026. The workshop is hosted by Chimurenga and facilitated by the artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjali Sagar of The Otolith Group.
Application Deadline: January 11, 2026
The African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) invites South African based writers, artists, theorists, video-makers, choreographers, theatre-makers and animators to apply for African Cosmotechnics, a five-day intensive workshop in Cape Town, January 26 – 31, 2026. The workshop is hosted by Chimurenga and facilitated by the artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjali Sagar of The Otolith Group.
African Cosmotechnics is a five-day workshop for ten participants that brings artists, writers, theorists, animators, theatre-makers, and filmmakers together to approach animation not only as technique or as genre but as a way of thinking the relations between images, sounds and voices in terms of animism, abstraction, automotion and automation.
Images that exceed realism, artificial worlds that surpass the evidentiary, entities that behave according to their own logics: these are often dismissed as ‘fantasy’ or celebrated for their ‘escapism’. African Cosmotechnics proposes to examine animation, instead, for its capacity to test the relations between the experience, perception and imagination of spirits, forces, entities and powers.
African Cosmotechnics is not a technical workshop for producing an animation. It is a workshop for rethinking what animation could, might or should be.
Through a program devoted to screening, listening, reading, writing, drawing, diagramming and speaking, African Cosmotechnics invites attendees to engage in a project of reimagining animation.
By drawing on the wealth of Afrological technicities that provide ways of organising the relations between earth, world and planet, African Cosmotechnics aims to engage with animation as a cosmotechnics.
Cosmotechnics, in Yuk Hui’s formulation, as a means, a method and a medium for investigating the relations between terms of cosmic order and terms of moral order mediated through abstract, concrete, aesthetic technicities.
African Cosmotechnics investigates animation as a technical process for manufacturing portals between everyday and other than human worlds.
Those selected will participate in informal study that approaches fictions, fables, songs, videos theories, textiles and games as diagrams for assembling worlds from archives of animation, animism, aesthetics, futurity, ancestrality, indigeneity, rituality and Africanity.
Who Should Apply?
Experience in animation is welcome but is not required. We welcome intergenerational practitioners from across the continent with experience in: critical theory, speculative fiction, experimental poetry, novel writing, experimental video, experimental theatre, performance, choreography, music recording, sound composition.
Ideal applicants include artists working in: writing, painting, choreography, composition, directing, editing, sound design, scriptwriting.
We welcome participants who are actively exploring:
Interdisciplinary approaches that combine animation with speculative fiction, critical theory, performance, video, or sound design;
Engaged in exploring Afrological, Afrodiasporic, indigenous, ancestralist, animist and futurist technicities for world making, remaking and repairing.
Essential qualities:
Openness to dialogic exchanges of processuality, reflection, recursion, prolepsis and retroduction.
Willingness to engage with the abductive logics of speculation, intuition, guesswork, hypothesis, proposition, theorisation, abstraction and thought experiment.
Commitment to participation in a five-day intensive workshop through active contribution to a environment of shared intellection.
How to Apply
Interested participants should submit the following:
1. Basic Information – Name, contact details, location, and creative discipline(s).
2. Experience – Briefly describe your background in theory, fiction, poetry, writing, video, theatre, animation, or other media arts, whether formal training, self-taught or professional work.
3. Creative Interest – Explain what draws you to this workshop and what you hope to explore or develop in your practice through participation.
4. Focus of Practice – Describe the particular themes, methods, or questions you are interested in exploring in your work.
5. Optional Work Sample – Share an example of your own creative work at any stage of development whether video clip, visual art, performance, documentation, animation or media project.
Submission Formats:
● Written descriptions (1 page max)
● Video files (up to 3 minutes)
● Audio files (up to 4 minutes)
Final participants will receive a one-time mobility stipend to travel to Cape Town for the duration of the workshop. This stipend is for South Africa-based artists. Successful applicants will be informed by January 16, 2026.
Applications should be submitted by January 12, 2026 via email to: info@afmac.institute
AFMAC is an initiative born of Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car #20 in partnership with BMW and Zeitz MOCAA. This workshop is designed to foster experimentation, collaboration, and artistic exchange among African filmmakers and media practitioners via a rotating film and media arts workshop across five African cities – Dakar, Lagos, Tangiers, Cape Town, and Nairobi. In each city, a respected local arts organization hosts a different lead artist who will facilitate a week-long workshop with artists based in the host city. Artists living outside the city but within the nation-state are invited to apply.