🎉 The 33rd International Calicomix Festival 2026 opens its doors with DUENDES, a space where imagination becomes graphic action. We invite artists from all continents to transform symbols, legends and fantastic beings into visual narratives that celebrate cultural diversity, ancestral memory and contemporary creativity, recognizing and valuing the respect that individuals and communities deserve.
🎯 Objective
To bring together graphic creators from the five continents in an international exhibition that highlights the richness of the magical and the fantastic, integrating local traditions and personal universes into a digital catalogue that will be globally distributed as a living memory of the festival.
👨🎨 Who Can Participate:
• Illustrators, caricaturists, comic artists, graphic designers and visual artists.
• Creators of any age and nationality.
• Special category for children artists.
📚 Categories:
• Illustration: original works in any technique.
• Graphic narrative: comics, cartoons or visual sequences on a single page.
⚠️ Important note: works generated through artificial intelligence will not be accepted. The DUENDERÍA honors human creation as a testimony of imagination.
🧝♂️ Theme:
The representation of magical and fantastic beings characteristic of each country, tradition or personal imagination. Each duende is a graphic guardian that integrates into the collective universe of the DUENDERÍA.
📐 Format and requirements:
• Works in digital format (JPG, PNG or PDF) with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.
• Maximum size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm).
• Each participant may submit up to 3 works.
📝 Note for participants:
Each submitted work must include a similar technical sheet, with:
• Title of the work, Technique used, Name of the author and country of origin.
• Name and a brief description of its cultural or symbolic origin (max. 150 words).
📅 Key dates:
• Opening of the call: March 1, 2026.
• Deadline for submission of works: June 1, 2026.
• Official exhibition: August 1, 2026, in Santiago de Cali, Colombia.
📩 Submission of works:
Proposals must be sent to the official email of the festival: calicomixcolombia@gmail.com
Subject: DUENDES 2026
Subject: DUENDES 2026
🖼️ Selection and exhibition:
• A curatorial committee will select the works that will be part of the official exhibition of the DUENDERÍA at the 33rd International Calicomix Festival.
• All received works will be considered for digital dissemination on the festival platforms.
🏅 Recognition:
• Official certificate for selected participants.
• Inclusion in the International Digital Catalog of the DUENDERÍA 2026, sent to each author and distributed globally as a memory of the festival.
• Dissemination of each work with the name and country of its author, recognizing their contribution to this encounter.
• Artists donate to the Festival the publication rights for dissemination purposes, maintaining intact their moral and intellectual rights as authors.
📜 Conditions of participation:
• Participation in DUENDES implies acceptance of all the rules described here.
• Artists guarantee that the submitted works are their own creation.
• Works that violate third-party rights, include discriminatory or violent messages, or are contrary to human dignity will not be accepted.
• The moral and intellectual rights of each work belong exclusively to its author. The Festival acquires only reproduction and dissemination rights for cultural and educational purposes, without profit.
🎭 Curatorial note:
🌎 The DUENDERÍA is not a competition, but a planetary graphic celebration. It does not seek to rank or judge, but to celebrate the diversity and the creative richness of each proposal. Each work is a testimony of the extraordinary beings that inhabit our minds and our territories.
🎨 We invite all artists to contribute their myths, guardians and fantasies to build together a catalogue that celebrates ancestral memory and contemporary imagination.
👺 The DUENDERÍA is a space of planetary convergence. Each culture has imagined and named its own guardians, spirits and extraordinary beings.
🎨 We invite artists to draw inspiration from this diversity to give life to their creations: Ekekos, Gnomos, Elfos, Aluxes, Tengus, Chaneques, Domovoi, Leprechaun, Mukis, Mohanes, Silfos, Sátiros, Curupiras, etc.
🍀 This list is a sample of the imaginary richness that inhabits the territories of the world.
🌿 Each artist may contribute their own myths, guardians and fantasies so that together we can build the international catalogue of the DUENDERÍA 2026.