city is sound, city is quicksand

– voicing imaginaries and dissonances

With this open call we welcome proposals for city is sound, city is quicksand – voicing imaginaries and dissonances, the third art + research event organized by the City as Space of Rules and Dreaming research project[1] (enabled by Kone Foundation 2021–2024) at Hietsu Pavilion in Helsinki on May 21–23, 2024. The event focuses on spaces, voices and practices of uncertainty and potentiality in urban landscape.

VENUE & TIME
May 21–23, 2024 in Hietsu Pavilion (Address: Hiekkarannantie 9, Helsinki) 
Opening event on May 21st, followed by a two-day program with installations, performances, acts, talks, and discussions.
 
ABOUT
City is a space of several intersecting and conflicting interests, practices, and orders. It is an aesthetic, political, legal, material, architectural, imaginary, virtual, and discursive space in which various dissonances and incompatible forces play their role. The city is very much also our/their space. It channels freedom, needs, actions, and desires of those inhabiting it.
 
The city is sound, city is quicksand – voicing imaginaries and dissonances focuses on spaces, voices and practices of uncertainty and potentiality in the city. We invite practitioners and scholars, artists and researchers to come and share their insights and practices through any or many of the following fields: city, urban space, urban environment / spatial, visual, sonic, performative practices in arts / artistic research, architecture, aesthetics, law and legal theory and practice, cultural geography, or other – around questions such as: 
 
How can the discourses and debates on distribution of sensibilities and politics of city practices (incl. practices of theories) be rethought from a spatial point of view? How to allow new spaces and positions to emerge and act differently from what the prevailing orders, norms and roles suggest? Can diverse encounters and clashes within a multiplicity of agents, human and more-than-human, trigger the opening-up of positions and spaces for reorganization, and if so, how? 
 
At the heart of the event is the location itself – Hietsu Pavilion, which was renovated during 2014–2015 by volunteers and local residential association to be used by NGOs, cultural actors in various scales, and Töölö residents as their own village house. The pavilion is run by a non-profit public organization. Hietsu Pavilion and its exquisite surroundings are known as the event-space for topical and timeless, polemic and possible worlds to come fore.
 
Appreciating the Hietsu spirit, the City as Space of Rules and Dreaming temporarily inhabits the pavilion in end-May 2024 to gather with fellow artists and researchers to talk and do around what we further have identified as topical questions around ‘city practices, practicing the city’ – such as, yet not limited to these: 
 
How to create spaces of uncertainty and potentiality for things and beings to emerge and concretize? How to create spaces of disagreement and temporality that allow the emergence of new collectives that do not exclude certain particularities? What kinds of dialogues, dissonances, and counter-hegemonies are, could or should be demonstrated and suggested? What constitutes as the ethos or spirit of Helsinki or any other city today – and what lies under the (polished and capitalized, or unfinished and incomplete) surface of the city?
 
Join us in discussing how urban space is formed and shared, and what kinds of processes, practices, structures and spaces of disagreement and controversy, as well as inclusion or marginalization are there? What kind of fractures, escape lines and dreams are hidden in the ‘normativity’ of urban space? What kinds of spaces of shadow, noise, potentialities, and dreams are there?
 
We cordially welcome 1) proposals of artworks, 2) talks/presentations, and 3) workshops.
Welcome to make and take space for gestures and voices polemic and playful, incredible, and concrete. To dare, do, say!
 
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please submit your proposal in PDF by March 29 to: cityissoundcityisquicksand@gmail.com 

1. Proposal of an artwork (installation, intervention, performative work, or other), describing the form (and wished duration if one-off durational work), and relation to the event theme. Please include a textual description in 300–500 words with 1–3 images/sketches illustrating the work, compiled in one PDF document.
   NB 1: Please let us know whether you wish the work be situated inside the pavilion or by it/outside in the public space around the pavilion. Please be mindful that the outside space is public space, including possible interference of the everydaily and unexpected. NB 2: Please prepare to be self-sufficient in terms of technical equipment and installation.
2. Abstract of talk/ presentation: 500–700 words describing the mode of presentation, methodology, key arguments, contributions, objectives, and possible links to actual cases, artworks, projects. (NB. Basic presentation tech provided on site.)

3. Workshop proposal 300–500 words describing the objective, means, methods, duration, and min/max number of participants. 
 
Format: Please compile all material in one PDF document
 
Language: All submissions in English
 
Naming the proposals: 
Lastname_Firstname_Title of proposal_Category (1. Artwork, 2. Presentation/Talk, 3. Workshop)
 
KEY DATES
Submission deadline: 29.3.2024 
Notification of acceptance: 12.4.2024
 
Contact information and inquiries: 
cityissoundcityisquicksand@gmail.com 
 
About the City as Space of Rules and Dreaming research project