Programme
The Fellowship
A 6-month transdisciplinary research and exploration programme for thinkers, artists, and practitioners engaged in cultural and systemic renewal.
Overview
A Transdisciplinary exploration Programme
The Animae Mundi Fellowship is a transdisciplinary research and exploration program for thinkers, artists, and practitioners engaged in cultural and systemic renewal. Operating between France and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it creates a sustained encounter between intellectual traditions that have shaped distinct civilizational horizons.
Fellows engage in rigorous inquiry across epistemology, aesthetics, social thought, ecology, and emerging intelligence, working at the threshold where philosophy meets governance, and imagination informs institutional life.
At its core, the Fellowship seeks to strengthen cultural agency and intellectual sovereignty. It supports the emergence of authorship capable of contributing to long-term societal coherence and nation-building.
There are no exams or prescribed tracks. Fellows are offered mentorship, rigorous dialogue, and protected time for research and production, not merely to study transformation, but to advance it within the ecosystems they serve.
Structure
A Two-Part Arc of EXPLORATION
The Animae Mundi Fellowship unfolds as a deliberate passage between movement and grounding, encounter and authorship. Structured across
two distinct yet interrelated phases, it invites fellows first into a journey of intellectual crossing and perceptual expansion, and then into a continuum of responsibility and contribution. Together, these environments form a coherent arc: from odyssey to rootedness, from inquiry in motion to imagination embodied within living systems.
The Fellowship begins in the South of France, anchored in the Mediterranean as a civilizational sea of passage and encounter. For millennia, this basin has carried merchants and mystics, philosophers and poets, a moving archive where art, metaphysics, ritual, and architecture evolved
in dialogue.
Phase I, The Mediterranean Odyssey
2 months
As a geography of crossings, between sea and land, desert and forest, reason and transcendance, the Mediterranean invites fellows into an odyssey of thought and perception. Its layered cities, ruins, and contemporary forms stage a simultaneity of epochs, where the ancient and the emergent coexist without resolution.
This phase is not retreat but initiation. Creativity here is stirred by encounter and displacement, by the necessity of translation across traditions. The Mediterranean does not offer answers; it sets the journey in motion, calling fellows to navigate complexity with rigor, imagination, and authorship.
Phase II, The Arabian Continuum
If the Mediterranean Odyssey sets inquiry in motion, the Arabian Continuum invites it to take root. A landscape of vast horizons and interior depth, the Peninsula cultivates concentration, orientation, and responsibility. The inherited and the emergent coexist with particular intensity, demanding discernment rather than spectacle.
4 months
The Fellowship continues in Fellows base countries in the Arabian Peninsula, entering not a crossing but a continuum, a civilizational field shaped by revelation, poetry, trade, and desert cosmology.
Here, knowledge is not only inherited; it is carried forward through language, memory, and living practice.
In this phase, imagination meets commitment. Fellows engage a society actively shaping its future, where cultural agency and intellectual sovereignty are lived imperatives. Creativity becomes contribution, an act of authorship within evolving architectures of knowledge, identity, and nation-building.
Fellows conclude their journey by sharing their work through essays, symposiums, exhibitions, or dialogues, contributing to the Commons and testing ideas in encounter with broader publics.
Public Restitution
Eligibility
Who Should Apply
The Fellowship is open to thinkers, artists, researchers, and practitioners working at the intersection of disciplines. You do not need to possess advanced expertise in the fields of exploration.
What matters is the quality of your inquiry, the depth of your commitment, and your mature capacity to contribute to a generative intellectual community.
We are especially interested in applicants who:
Bring rigour and imagination to questions that cannot be contained within a single field
Are committed to cultural transformation through ideas, art, or social practice
Work at the edges of philosophy, art, technology, policymaking, or spiritual cosmology
Seek to cultivate new languages, symbols, and grammars of meaning
Are comfortable with ambiguity, deep listening, and the slow work of thinking
Wayfinders
carriers of thought
Fellows work closely with a constellation of mentors, philosophers, artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners who bring decades of experience to the questions that matter.
Application
How to Apply
The Animae Mundi Fellowship is awarded through an open call process. Application deadlines are announced in advance, and selections are made on a cohort basis.
A 1,000–1,500 word statement outlining your central research question, the intellectual territory you seek to explore, and why the Fellowship provides the appropriate context for your work.
Statement of Purpose
Portfolio or Writing Sample
Selected examples of your work, essays, creative projects, research, or documentation of practice, demonstrating the quality, depth, and originality of your inquiry.
Names and contact details of two individuals who can speak to your intellectual rigor, creative vision, and capacity to contribute to a collaborative environment.
Review & Conversation
Applications are reviewed by the Fellowship team and advisory mentors. Shortlisted candidates will be invited for a conversation with the Fellowship Director prior to final selection.
Two References
Begin Your Journey
Applications are open. We seek people who bring both depth and generosity to their work, those ready to think otherwise and build anew.