Announcement: new fellows for the 2026 Framer Framed x UvA Political Science fellowship programme

Framer Framed is pleased to introduce artists Pennie Key and Radna Rumping as 2026 fellows in the collaborative fellowship programme with the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The programme aims to bridge political sciences with contemporary artistic practices of political engagement.

During their fellowship, Pennie Key and Radna Rumping focus their artistic research on how bodies and practices persist within systems designed to control. Both take public space as their point of departure and situate their work in the city of Amsterdam, each engaging with a different environment.

Pennie concentrates on De Wallen, where she lives since 2020, addressing the regulation of bodies, labour and desire. The area continues to draw her as a site where normative sexuality operates within a narrow spectrum, structured around economies of consumption and extraction. From her position as both an artist and a sex worker, she investigates how these systems shape the performance of masculinities, how desire circulates, and how questions of spatial belonging take form.

Radna builds on her recent essay publication Shaky Ground (Stubborn Material) to further explore the notion of “stubborn material” as it manifests in Amsterdam’s public space. She takes the “Drijvende Tuinen” by Robert Jasper Grootveld and its legacy in the Eastern Docklands as her starting point. Her research foregrounds artistic practices – past and present – that challenge dominant modes of visibility, repetition and control, attending to how fragile, invisible or intricate arrangements come into being and persist despite their vulnerability.

The artists are in ongoing dialogue during the fellowship, through collaborative readings, conversations and shared city walks and site visits. They move through – and are moved by – the urban environments that shape their research. The fellowship culminates in an interdisciplinary gathering in early summer, where they present and reflect on their process together.

This project is part of the fellowship line Community, Democracy and the Urban Environment. The structure of the fellowship is developed by Framer Framed in close collaboration with Floris Vermeulen, associate professor at the UvA’s Political Science programme Challenges to Democratic Representation.

With the fellowship programme, Framer Framed is following up on a decade of projects and programmes from Stichting Netwerk Democratie – integrating themes of deliberative ‘bottom up’ democracy, social movements organisation and digitalisation. Connecting media studies and political sciences with artistic practices, the fellowship in collaboration with the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, seek to encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to artistic research.