Open Call: AA Visiting School Dubai

The AA VS Climate Cartographies is committed to exploring the longue durée of climate change at heritage sites by deploying cartographic thinking to create new maps that capture unexplored relations in our environment through different modes of representation. Research produced around heritage sites, embedded in thorough documentation of environmental changes, gathers an archive of the longue durée of climate change. The course uses different mediums that appropriate cartographic thinking to find new spatial and temporal relationships in the context investigated.

A glitch, often perceived as an error or disruption, serves as an unanticipated opportunity for insight and growth. Supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation in Dubai, the week-long workshop explores the undefined or the in-between through situated spatial sonic practices that encompass listening, translation, and transcription.

The School's agenda in Dubai examines the intersection of climate change and heritage, while also considering innovative ways of representing these themes in and through the medium of sound. Participants are invited to collaboratively interact with data, research, artistic practices, and the region's complex history to develop projects that emerge from a sensitivity to both sound and land.

In the past, human settlements were primarily shaped by geographical terrains; today, however, they are predominantly defined by borders. A new conversation has arisen around the challenges posed by border regimes and restrictions on movement, especially in the face of environmental disasters. Valuable insights can be gained from places where border controls are exceptional—areas that exist as anomalies within the modern nation-state system.

Wadi Madha – a mountainous, liminal territory connecting Oman and the UAE – serves as a departure point for participants to engage with broader issues of climate change, heritage, and mobility.


The programme is open to current architecture and design students, PhD candidates, post-docs and young professionals.

Click to read more and apply.

Deadline: 28 February.