Most projection mapping open calls give you a pretty building and a vague theme. This one gives you a socialist-era administrative block built for a steelworks named after Lenin and asks you to deal with it.
AFTER THE PALACE: Resonance 2026 is an international video mapping competition and outdoor showcase in Kraków’s Nowa Huta, organised by the Faculty of Art at the University of the National Education Commission (UKEN) as part of unLoc, an international artistic and research project.
The essentials
- Deadline: 30 October 2026, 23:59 CET — four weeks from now
- Entry fee: free
- Selection results: by 10 November 2026
- Outdoor showcase and award ceremony: 23 November 2026, Courtyard of Building “Z”, New Administrative Centre, 1 Ujastek St., Kraków-Nowa Huta
- Open to: digital media artists, animators, motion designers, creative teams and design studios worldwide
Prizes:
| Place | Award |
|---|---|
| 1st | PLN 10,000 |
| 2nd | PLN 6,000 |
| 3rd | PLN 3,000 |
The brief: 2D/3D video mapping with sound, 1–8 minutes, site-specific to the courtyard façade of Building “Z”, formerly part of the Lenin Steelworks. Generative AI is permitted with disclosure.
Why the site is the most interesting thing about this call
Nowa Huta is not a neutral surface. It is a planned socialist-realist district built from 1949 as a workers’ city attached to the Lenin Steelworks — the largest industrial project of communist Poland, deliberately sited next to a historically Catholic, intellectual, bourgeois Kraków as an ideological counterweight. Its central square is monumental, its avenues radiate on a designed axis, and the whole thing was intended to produce a new kind of citizen.
It has since been, in rough order: a showpiece, a site of 1980s Solidarity-era unrest, a post-industrial problem, and now a district with a complicated heritage status that the city is still arguing about. The steelworks still operates, under different ownership and a different name.
The call’s own phrase for this is “dissonant heritage”, which is the correct technical term — architecture whose historical meaning is contested and uncomfortable, where preservation is not obviously the same as endorsement. It is the same category of problem as what to do with colonial monuments or fascist-era civic buildings.
For a projection artist, that is a genuine gift and a genuine trap. A gift because the building means something before you touch it, and you are working with content rather than just geometry. A trap because the easy moves are all bad: ironic Soviet kitsch, hammer-and-sickle imagery as graphic texture, generic glitch-the-authority gestures. Those will be a third of the submissions. The brief asks for reinterpretation in the context of history, cultural identity and memory, and the work that wins will almost certainly be the one that engages with Nowa Huta as somewhere people actually live rather than as a symbol.
Practical notes if you’re entering
Site-specific means get the geometry. Ask the organisers for façade documentation — measurements, orthographic photography, ideally a mesh. Mapping made against a perspective photograph will not line up on the night, and the difference between a piece that sits on the architecture and one that is merely projected at it is the whole craft.
Sound is required, not optional. “2D/3D video mapping with sound” means you are submitting an audiovisual work. An outdoor courtyard in Kraków in late November is a reverberant, cold, open space — compose for it rather than for headphones, and expect the PA to be unknown.
One to eight minutes is a wide range and the choice is strategic. Eight minutes of mapping is a lot of content to produce and a lot of attention to hold from an audience standing outside in November. A tight three minutes that is fully resolved beats eight that sag.
Disclose the AI. The call explicitly permits generative AI with disclosure, which is a sensible and increasingly common position, and it is a condition — not a formality. If you generate textures, motion or sound with a model, say so in the submission.
Late November, outdoors, in Poland. Sunset in Kraków on 23 November is around 15:40, so there is plenty of darkness. There is also a real chance of rain or snow, and your work will be seen by people who are cold. Short, bright, high-contrast and legible will survive the conditions better than subtle and slow.
Where it sits
Four weeks to a free-entry call with cash prizes, a strong site and a 23 November showcase makes this one of the more actionable opportunities currently open. For comparison, the other video mapping route worth knowing is the Video Mapping Festival awards in Lille, which runs on a different and larger scale.
We publish conference and festival previews about four weeks ahead, and open calls as we verify them. Next due: Adobe MAX (10–12 November 2026), preview around 13 October.