Antropical was established in 2016 by Aurélie d'Incau and Clio van Aerde.

It first took the form of a 10-day artist residency. This residency took place in the immediate run-up to and on the site of the Kolla Festival in Steinfort, Luxembourg, and one of the defining purposes of the residency was to prepare artistic projects for the Festival. These projects ranged from installations and exhibitions to theatrical performances and written pieces, photography and digital art presented through a distributed journal.

This residency was repeated in 2017, 2018 and 2019 – although it had increased in length to three whole weeks by the last of these. (Funding for the residencies came from Focuna / the Ministry of Culture, through grants of €3000 or thereabouts.)

Each residency featured between 10 and 20 artists – active in all manner of different artistic fields, and originating from all round Europe, and sometimes even from farther away. Many of them stayed in touch and kept collaborating afterwards, and so a kind of collective was fast emerging.

The pandemic caused plans for a residency in 2020 to be abandoned, but Antropical remained busy.

Representatives of the ANF – that is, the Administration of Nature and Forests, part of Luxembourg’s Ministry of the Environment, Climate and Biodiversity – had visited the 2019 Kolla Festival and been impressed by how Antropical had framed the whole event – basically, Antropical had claimed the Festival’s physical site as the independent ‘State of Nature’, and set up border controls at its main entrance. Those arriving at the Festival were automatically made citizens of this state, issued passports, and warned that, if they wanted to leave at any time and do so legally, they would first have to collect stamps from a series of bureaucrats located throughout the state. Their passport included a map of where to find these bureaucrats. The bureaucrats were of course the artists, and each would give their stamp only if the passport holder properly experienced or took part in the art project they were contributing to the Festival. This proved an extremely effective way of motivating those attending the Festival to engage with the artists’ work. The ANF, in 2020, wanted to do something similar with their sites and centres throughout Luxembourg, and, with Antropical’s permission, they used the name, the structure and much of the iconography of Antropical’s ‘State of Nature’ project. In return, they of course credited Antropical and welcomed Antropical to a feature another project of its own on the ANF map/itinerary.

Antropical’s contribution to the ANF’s 2020 ‘State of Nature’ programme went by the name of the ‘Ministry of Strange Affairs’, and was basically a travelling mock government ministry, asking surreal but thought-provoking administrative questions and engaging in surreal but thought-provoking administrative rituals with any members of the public who would stop and talk to it. Aurélie d'Incau has continued to develop and deploy the Ministry of Strange Affairs ever since, sometimes in collaboration with other Antropical artists, and, in 2023, wrote a masters dissertation on her experiments with it.

Also in 2020 Antropical received a grant of €10 000 as part of the Luxembourg government’s Vakanz Doheem programme for its ‘Another View on Nature’ project – which was a diverse series of interactive artworks located in the Mirador Forest, all intended to help people to see and relate to their natural surroundings in unfamiliar ways. 15 different artists contributed to this project, and the artworks ranged from an immersive audio tour to fantastical statues to public information signs with creatively misleading directions to large dinosaur footprints.

Antropical then held two residencies in 2021 – the first online and lasting one week, the second near Bologna in Italy and lasting two weeks. Much as the original Antropical residencies had led up to the Kolla Festival, the residency in Italy led up to exhibitions at Sementerie Artistiche in Crevalcore and at CA/OS Gallery in Modena.

Also in late 2021 Antropical took part in a conference on socially engaged art at Plan d'Est: Pôle arts visuels Grand Est in Thionville, France – with three Antropical artists leading a workshop on its methodologies - and was profiled on culture.lu.

In 2022, Antropical then held another one-week residency and exhibition – this time at Ilali Studio in Berlin, Germany.

Plans in 2023 for a residency in the Netherlands, most likely in Amsterdam, fell through essentially for scheduling reasons – the group could not find a period of time when enough members, or at least enough of the ones who were determined to attend, were simultaneously free.

In late 2023, Antropical started offering its Cultural-Artistic Guidance Service through its website. The Cultural-Artistic Guidance Service – since given the primary title Paths to Perception – invites anyone to send the group their questions about anything that’s on their mind or interesting them, with the group then responding by recommending cultural and artistic works that they think might elucidate the question in some way. In the summer of 2024, Antropical, in partnership with the Our Common Future, received a grant of €10 000 from Fondation Sommer to run a series Paths to Perception workshops in schools, universities, arts centres and other public institutions. In these workshops, Antropical artists present a programme of art works on a theme determined by the anonymous submissions of signed-up participants, and then facilitate discussion on what we can learn from those art works.

Throughout these years, the group has also continued to share resources, opportunities and expertise, to hold occasional online sessions in which members show or describe what they’re individually working on and the others provide feedback, and to collaborate frequently and in diverse ways on a one-to-one basis.

In total, 48 artists from 20 different countries have been part of Antropical – 8 of these with significant ties, through residence or origin, to Luxembourg. Probably 15 or so members of the group are significantly active at any one time, but who they are changes from year and year and occasion to occasion.