Not long after my dad’s death, I visited the Capela dos Ossos in Évora, Portugal, a small 16th-century chapel with walls and pillars covered with bones and skulls of thousands of individuals exhumed from local cemeteries.
Above the entrance, an inscription reads:
“Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos.”
(“We bones that are here, await yours.”)
I found the idea of giving bones a voice quite funny in that context. Walking in, you can almost hear the cramped bones chatting and gossiping, looking down at you and judging, longing for you to join them as a new friend. The monks who built it did an amazing job of puzzling together the human remains, often following the architectural structures and arranging skulls to create beautiful shapes that almost make you forget they are human remains.
This exhibition emerges from that image.
Just as the monks assembled those bones, I want to create a space where different photographic voices, strangers to one another, are brought together in a shared context. SWIT is looking for images that convey emotions, perspectives, doubts, irony, intimacy, distance, anything the theme evokes. All interpretations are welcome.
What does death mean to you? What remains after we leave? Do we leave?
I hope the exhibition becomes an occasion to discuss these questions.
Stefano Conti,
SWIT Platform founder
DEADLINE: March 28, 2026 at 23:59
WHO CAN APPLY
Sweden-based and Italy-based artists, regardless of nationality or age.
HOW TO APPLY
You can apply with 1–10 photographs that relate to the curatorial text above.
If you feel like, you can also write a few lines explaining why you chose these images, what inspired them, or any thoughts you would like to share about the theme. We are considering to write a collective exhibition text composed of anonymous fragments drawn from participants’ reflections. We do not yet know whether this will take shape, but we are interested in trying.
We don’t care about CV or portfolio for this open call.
THE EXHIBITION
May 15 – June 7, 2026 at Kinesiska Muren, Göteborg.
WHAT TO EXPECT
After the deadline, SWIT will work for a few weeks as an editor, selecting, sequencing and grouping images that for different reasons work well together. After that, the selected artists will be requested to send high quality files for the print. SWIT will print the images on long rolls of paper hanging in the exhibition space, forming sequences and clusters that combine works from different artists. In the exhibition, each artists will be given credits for their images.
Selected artists don’t have to produce anything, neither pay any fee.
By the end of April, all applicants will receive notification of their application results.
DO YOU STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?
Feel free to reach out at switplatform@gmail.com
(Don’t send DMs on Instagram, we don’t check that often. )
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For writing this page, AI has not been used.