Before being an object to be narrated, adolescence is a demand for space — where those who inhabit it can express themselves without being translated. In that space, the adult gaze stops being a tool and becomes a filter: it explains, organizes, justifies, rearranges.

Yet adolescence is also what gets lost when we try to explain it: it doesn’t ask to be legible, nor to be translated.

It asks instead to be listened to — to be looked at with serious attention, without judgment. And it often sounds like friction, fear, inconsistencies: conflicts and codes that shift in the very moment they are spoken.
With this open call, Artphilein takes the uncomfortable position of trying, with care and commitment, to listen to those who are living it firsthand.

The aim is to make room for a portrait built with proximity, urgency, and responsibility — avoiding speaking over, interpreting, or domesticating.

Artphilein are looking for projects that are born inside the present and carry its tensions: life in an ecosystem of screens and gazes, negotiations with identity, the weight of the outside world — political, collective, unstable. Leaving aside the rhetoric of the transition narrative, what emerges if we stop telling adolescence from the outside?

The winner will receive a fully produced solo exhibition at the Artphilein Library (Autumn 2026), plus publication of a selection of images (and texts) in the Artphilein Dossier, produced for the exhibition and published by Artphilein Editions (Autumn 2026) as well as a cash prize.

To find out more and apply please go to the direct link.