Metamorphosis:
ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025
International 3-Week Academic Festival & Residency Program
Includes Critical Seminars & Art Production
Arquetopia Location: Puebla, Mexico
Program Dates: 3 weeks – July 28 to August 18, 2025
Applications are processed and selected in the order in which they are received.
Program Dates: 3 weeks – July 28 to August 18, 2025
Applications are processed and selected in the order in which they are received.This comprehensive, customized and prestigious 3-week critical residency program offers competitive professional opportunities for emerging and mid-career, national and international artists, curators, art educators, art historians, and students age 20 and over.
In celebration of our 15th anniversary, ArquetopiaSUMMER returns as the Metamorphosis Festival — a bold reinvention of our flagship program into an international academic festival and critical residency. This 3-week immersive experience brings together artists-in-residence, local students and professors, and community members, fostering an environment of interdisciplinary inquiry, experimentation, and ethical engagement. Over the past decade and a half, ArquetopiaSUMMER has grown from a critical residency into something larger: a space where knowledge, practice, and dialogue intersect in transformative ways. In the words of Audre Lorde, “Without community, there is no liberation.” It is this belief that has shaped the program’s evolution into a festival—an intentional gathering that celebrates the collective force of learning, creating, and imagining together.
Expanding beyond the studio and classroom, the Metamorphosis Festival actively engages a broader public through open lectures, an exhibition, and events. These public components are designed to spark dialogue and facilitate the exchange of ideas between diverse audiences, reinforcing our commitment to inclusive education and socially engaged art practices. Through this expanded model, the festival becomes a dynamic platform for collective reflection, critical discourse, and transformative encounters across disciplines and communities.
Metamorphosis: ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025 is a summer event dedicated to analyzing material culture as material practice—an approach that makes critical inquiry both tangible and inclusive, accessible to participants across disciplines and experience levels. Framed through Arquetopia’s signature pedagogical model, the program invites participants to explore how artistic and cultural production shape and reflect power, national identity, and ideology.
This year’s edition will focus on 19th-century visual and material culture, with special attention to how books, prints, illustrations, and other material forms were used to construct national imaginaries. Participants will investigate how novels, popular imagery, everyday objects, and emerging technologies of the time contributed to the crafting of nationalism, race, and modernity—both visually and textually. By treating objects and images not just as historical evidence but as active agents, the festival offers a platform to engage with the past critically while considering its reverberations in contemporary creative practices. Through mentorship, collaborative projects, site-responsive exploration, and scholarly dialogue, Metamorphosis, ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025 encourages residents to rethink materiality as a dynamic, embodied way of knowing and making.
CRITICAL METHODOLOGIES
The methodology behind Metamorphosis: ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025 centers on material culture as material practice—an embodied and intuitive approach that invites participants to reconsider the role of artistic and academic practices as forms of inquiry. This model prioritizes process over product, treating creative and scholarly work as dynamic spaces for critical engagement with the world. Rather than viewing objects and images as static artifacts, participants are encouraged to explore them as active agents in the construction of meaning, power, and identification. Informed by Arquetopia’s signature pedagogical model and rooted in interdisciplinary experimentation, this edition highlights material culture as a key tool for understanding how material forms shape ideologies and affect change. The festival emphasizes exploration over certainty, encouraging a hands-on, engaged process that fosters critical thinking. By treating artistic and academic practices as ways of knowing and making, this approach emphasizes how materials—whether objects, images, or texts—hold power in both their production and reception. Participants will explore material culture as material practice—an approach that makes critical inquiry both tangible and inclusive, accessible to participants across disciplines and experience levels, while inviting vulnerability and relationality in creative, artistic, and scholarly work. This approach considers how political desire intersects with the forms and frameworks through which we engage with material culture, from the aestheticization of violence to the roles of cultural institutions in shaping public consciousness. The festival provides space for questioning the role of institutions, inviting participants to reflect on their own ethical responsibilities as artists, academics, and critical thinkers.
OPEN LECTURES, EXHIBITION AND CULTURAL EVENTS
The educational core of Metamorphosis: ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025 revolves around open lectures, an exhibition, and events that highlight material culture as both context and method. These activities encourage interdisciplinary engagement and offer participants opportunities to engage with material culture in dynamic and interactive ways. Through open lectures, master classes, round tables, an exhibition and other cultural events, participants will delve into how 19th-century visual and material culture shaped ideologies of nationalism, race, class, gender and modernity. The program will explore how books, prints, illustrations, and everyday objects acted as active agents in constructing national imaginaries, empowering participants to analyze the ongoing influence of material forms on contemporary political and cultural discourse. The festival's pedagogical model fosters mutual exchange, encouraging participants to learn through teaching and collaboration. By engaging with mentors, local practitioners, students, professors, and communities, participants will explore how artistic and academic practices interact with broader social and historical dynamics. Public events—including lectures, exhibitions, and dialogues—extend the festival's reach, promoting interdisciplinary exchange across diverse audiences and reaffirming Arquetopia's commitment to inclusive, socially engaged education.
The Metamorphosis: ArquetopiaSUMMER Festival 2025 spans three weeks across multiple venues, including BUAP (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla), Universidad para Adultos, the Facultad de Artes Plásticas y Audiovisuales de la BUAP, and various museums in Puebla. This dynamic festival offers a diverse range of academic and artistic activities, creating a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and creative collaboration. The festival fosters an environment of innovative thinking and artistic experimentation, encouraging participants to connect contemporary and historical contexts.
Artist-in-Residence and Arquetopia 2019 Residency Scholarship Award Recipient Miguel Keerveld (Suriname)
Special Guest Scholars and Artists-in-Residence in museum visit
Special Guest Scholars and Artists-in-Residence in program seminars and museum visits
METAMORPHOSIS: ARQUETOPIASUMMER FESTIVAL 2025
FIVE INTERNATIONAL GUEST SCHOLARS & INSTRUCTORS
1. DR. KIRSTEN PAI BUICK
(USA)
(USA)
Kirsten Pai Buick, Ph.D., Kirsten Pai Puick, Ph.D., Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick is a distinguished scholar specializing in the visual and material culture of the first British Empire and its diaspora in the US, Caribbean, and India. She holds the position of Professor of Art History and is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Buick earned her B.A. in Art History and Italian Literature from the University of Chicago in 1985. She received her M.A. in Art History in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Art History in 1999 from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on Mary Edmonia Lewis, advised by Sharon F. Patton and George Gurney. Her teaching includes courses on British Colonial and U.S. Art, American Landscape representation, African American Art, and Pro- and Anti-Abolitionist Images in the Atlantic World. She also offers seminars on topics like Photographing Jim Crow, Patronizing Women, and The Victorian Nude. Her research interests span histories of science, medicine, religion, monuments, public space, and the racialization of mobility. Dr. Buick has published extensively on African American art history. She is currently working on two manuscripts: “In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism,” and “Surveying American Art: A History of the Visual Cultures of White Racial Formation, 1675-1876.” In 2022, Dr. Buick was honored as a College Art Association Distinguished Scholar.
2. FRANCISCO GUEVARA
(Mexico)
(Mexico)
Francisco Guevarais a visual artist, independent scholar and curator based in Mexico and Peru. He specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects, and the analysis of performativity in contemporary art practices. His experience spans more than 20 years of designing, curating, and managing art projects through visual arts education, and international cooperation to promote social change. His essays and critical texts focus on place and history as ideological distortions, and address subjects such as contemporary art practices, historiography of art, and the artist residency field, and have been featured in numerous international publications. As of 2009, Guevara is co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Arquetopia, a non-profit foundation and transnational artist residency program promoting Development and social transformation through educational, artistic, and cultural programs.
As a visual artist, Guevara investigates the historical construction of the differentiation processes, embodiment, and the concept of distortion through a wide range of artistic/historical mediums, including painting, installation, and metalsmith. Protégé of Dolores Olmedo Patiño his work can be found in important private and public collections. He has participated in multiple collective exhibits and had nineteen solo shows, including the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque Museum and University of New Mexico in the U.S., and the 10th Mexican Festival in Australia. His work can be found in important private and public collections such as: Fundación Coleccion Jumex, Dolores Olmedo Museum, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Ministry of Culture of Bolivia, Salma Hayek-Pinault Collection, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II Private Collection, Denmark, among others. His residencies and honors include THE LAND/an art site, Youkobo Art Space Japan, and the American Institute of Architects Honor Award, both New Mexico and Albuquerque.
3. DR. KARIM KATTAN
(Palestine)
(Palestine)
Karim Kattan, Ph.D., is a writer with a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Paris Nanterre University. In French, his books include a collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur (2017), and a novel, Le Palais des deux collines (2021), which were both published by the Tunis-based Éditions Elyzad. Le Palais des deux collines was awarded the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie in 2021 and was shortlisted for many other literary awards. In English, his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Maine Review, +972 Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge, The Funambulist, Words Without Borders, The Baffler, and more. He was one of the co-founders and directors of el-Atlal, an arts and writing residency in the oasis of Jericho in Palestine. His writing was featured in various art spaces, exhibitions, and biennales, including the MMAG Foundation in Amman, Bétonsalon in Paris, B7L9 in Tunis, Arquetopia in Puebla, Art Kulte in Rabat, the Berlinale Forum in Berlin, Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou, and the 58th Venice Biennale.
4. DR. EMMANUEL ORTEGA
(USA)
(USA)
Emmanuel Ortega, Ph.D. (Art History, University of New Mexico), is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library for 2022-2023. As a scholar and curator, Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on images of autos-de-fe, nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States; his latest endeavor is the upcoming exhibition titled Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, opening at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in September of 2022. An essay titled, “The Mexican Picturesque and the Sentimental Nation: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Landscape,” was published by The Art Bulletin in the Summer of 2021. His book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge. He is a recurrent lecturer for Arquetopia Foundation.
FESTIVAL DURATION / TIME PERIOD
Three weeks: Monday, July 28 to Monday, August 18, 2025.
WHAT IS INCLUDED
WHAT IS INCLUDED
- Entrance to all the activities including lectures, master classes, exhibitions and other cultural events.
- Additionally, the program will feature a public program aimed at engaging with the local artistic community, organized through an open process to connect artists with diverse audiences across various venues. These venues include academic classrooms within a university setting, as well as dialogues and conversations held in an independent gallery and community-based space
- Activities are designed to promote intense creative work and artistic dialogue; therefore, artists allocate self-directed studio hours as part of their weekly schedule
Staff Support:
- Each resident meets weekly with our directorial and curatorial staff for individualized research assistance/resources, project guidance, and group critique
- Furnished, private bedroom
- 24-hour access to the kitchen for participants to prepare their own meals; meals/food are the participants' responsibility
- Wireless Internet
- Use of Arquetopia’s residency common spaces including outdoor terraces
- Shared, serviced bathrooms with modern fixtures and showers
- Housekeeping
- 24-hour access to large and bright, shared art studio with generous natural light
- Personal workspace with large table and wall space
- Some tools provided
- On-site darkroom provided for photographers
- Artists bring their own materials and supplies or obtain them locally
TO APPLY
Click here to apply for this special program.
