Call for papers
Ruralities, Artistic Ecologies and Sustainable
Futures

Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo (REG|AC), Vol. 12 (2026) UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA (UB)

 

Guest editors: Anna Maria Guasch, Julia Ramírez-Blanco & Olga Sureda.

 

Organized by: Research Project “Visualidad y Geoestética en la Era de la Crisis Ecosocial” (VIGEO, PID2022-139211OB-I00), Universitat de Barcelona

 

In the article Is the Countryside the Future of the Art World? (2019), Tom Jeffreys explains the confluence of events that undoubtedly make 2019 a turning point in the art world’s recognition of what has been termed ‘new rurality’ in the world of contemporary art. From the United States and Europe, with very different approaches to the museum institution, two initiatives converged in 2019 that marked a significant shift in how rurality began to be framed within contemporary art discourse. One of them, led by architect Reem Koolhaas, with a clear commitment to rural issues from an institutional perspective, and the other led by the Myvillages collective, which was not so much interested in defining rural issues as in using rural issues as a critique of cultural hegemony in the arts. Also in 2019, The Rural Assembly Symposium (Whitechapel, London) was held, at which artists, theorists, academics and curators contributed to articulating new perspectives on the countryside based on everyday experience and a critique of the rural-urban binary.
Thus, the panel Networked Rural: Mapping the Translocal sought to break with the representation of the rural as a remote space, isolated from global networks and economies. Rural environments are not static and disconnected from the dynamism of urban and global life, neither are they set apart from the complexities of industrial globalization (Peeren & Valdés-Olmos). Hence the need to foster a conversation that emphasises the interconnectedness of rural places, analysing how rural communities are integrated into a network of relationships that span the local, regional and global levels.

In recent years we have witnessed the consolidation of rural practices within translocal and transdisciplinary frameworks in various fields: new economies, pedagogies and rural residences combine community building, coexistence, social practice and concrete utopianism. In some of them, concepts such as ‘post-study’ and ‘community art’ play a central role, placed within the framework of collectives, artists’ self-organised projects and alternative communities allocated outside of transnational cultural centres.

Rural areas are, in our time of multiple ecological, economic, and social crises, gaining renewed attention as spaces of possibility, resistance, and imagination. In contrast to models that concentrate resources in cities, widening the rural-urban gap and subordinating the countryside to urban and industrial growth, new cultural geographies and ecological epistemologies are appearing as valuable propositions: ones that revalue rural knowledge and sustainable practices, within forms of human life that are deeply rooted in the materiality of their territories. These rural modalities present alternatives to both the hypercapitalist urban centres and to industrial agro-economies which include factory farming, monocrops and extractivism. Across many territories, especially in the Global South and in peripheral areas of the Global North, there is a genealogy of rural communities that have long developed ways of life based on care, self-management of resources, and cooperation. Far from being residual, these forms of organization are now being reimagined as viable alternatives for envisioning sustainable futures in both rural and urban contexts.

This Call For Papers stems from the plurality of these realities, to open a critical and transdisciplinary space for reflection on the growing role of ruralities in shaping resilient, diverse, and sustainable futures.

We have structured the core content of this REG|AC volume around three pivotal axes, illustrated by open questions derived from case studies involving art, social practice and visuality from the late 20th century through to the early 21st:

• Rural Imaginaries & Translocal Practices explores the symbolic construction of the rural through a translocal lens, examining how links are forged between geographically distant contexts that are nonetheless connected through artistic, cultural, or activist practices rooted in shared approaches to the rural as a site of critical action and creative potential.
• Art, Agroecologies & Institutional Critique investigates the intersections between contemporary artistic practices, agroecology, and strategies of institutional critique. The focus is on initiatives that operate in rural contexts to imagine new production models (both cultural and agricultural), rethinking the relationship between art, territory, and sustainability.
• Art & Rurality Between Centers and Peripheries addresses art and rurality projects in the tension between centers and peripheries. With a special emphasis on the Global South, we are interested in case studies that trace the geography of rurality within a complex multi-focal scenario.

Together, these panels offer a complex, multidimensional reading of ruralities—not only as physical geographies but also as epistemic, symbolic, and political spaces. Through dialogue between researchers, artists, activists, and local agents, the congress seeks to generate situated knowledge and foster collaborative networks that contribute to imagining more just, sustainable, and liveable futures from rural contexts.

Beyond these three axes, possible topics for this volume of REG|AC include, but are not limited to:

— What role do rural spaces play in contemporary ecological imaginaries and environmental activism?
— How do gender, migration, and labor reshape contemporary rural imaginaries?
— What forms of care, repair, and maintenance emerge from art practices rooted in rural ecologies?
— How do forms of knowledge and cultural practices shape social, economic and environmental dynamics within rural Indigenous communities?
— How are rural cultures being urbanized worldwide?
— How are agricultural practices, rural labor, and landscapes represented and negotiated within contemporary artistic and cultural practices?
— How does the rural artworld operate from an economic standpoint?
— In which ways does the artworld fetishize the rural as an idealized image?
— How can art make visible Rural Undercurrents —defined by Wapke Feenstra as invisible forces such as memories, local knowledges, affects, and social tensions—and foreground the layered complexity of rural cultures?

Together, these pivotal axes offer a complex, multidimensional reading of realities—not only as physical geographies but also as epistemic, symbolic, and political spaces. Through dialogue between researchers, artists, activists, and local agents, this conference seeks to share situated knowledge and foster collaborative networks that contribute to imagining more just, sustainable, and livable futures from rural contexts, within an understanding that goes beyond binaries and inhabits the urban-rural continuum.

 

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Articles should contain between 20,000 and 40,000 characters (3,000-6,000 words) including notes, and should also be accompanied by a title, abstract, keywords (these three elements in both Spanish and English) and bibliography. REG|AC uses APA standards for citing bibliographic information. The end of the article will include a section with all the references cited following the APA format. More information can be obtained on the official website of the APA (7th Edition) – Citation Guide (Research Guides at Rutgers University) and on other websites (in English and Spanish). Also at the Centre de Recursos per a l’Aprenentatge i la Investigació (CRAI) of the University of Barcelona (in Catalan, here and here). Articles that do not follow these citation standards will be automatically discarded.
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

– The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently submitted to another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in “Comments to the Editor”).
– The authors undertake to publish their own article and not copy all or part of work of others.
– The authors have registered and login with their full name, academic degree, institutional affiliation, status, country and email address, as it appears in ORCID.
– The submission file was sent in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect format.
– URLs for the references have been provided whenever possible.
– The body of the text is double spaced with standard margins, Times New Roman with a 12pt font and italics rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); all illustrations, figures and tables are within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
– The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the “Author Guidelines“.

 

USE OF IMAGES

The author is responsible for obtaining the corresponding permits for the reproduction of images included in the text. Images must be sent in separately, and will be numbered (Fig. 1, Fig. 2…) in correspondence with their placement in the text. Within the text, the place for the image to be inserted shall be specified by including the figure caption in the following format: Figure number, full stop, artist’s name, title, comma, year, full stop, museum/archive, full stop, institution granting permission for reproduction, full stop. For example:
Fig. 1. Doris Salcedo (2007). Shibboleth. Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

This journal uses the free academic journal management software Open Journal Systems. Articles should be uploaded through this system, with files properly anonymized. All information can be found in the “Information For Authors” and “Submissions” sections of the journal’s website.

 

WORK SCHEDULE

Call for proposals: until 10 May 2026.
Publication: December 2026.

 

 

 

 

VISUALITY AND GEOAESTHETICS IN THE ERA OF ECOSOCIAL CRISIS (VIGEO)
Funding organization: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain)
Reference: PID2022-139211OB-I00
Area: Cultura: filología, literatura y arte
IP: Martí Peran