Between Ebb and Flow: Interstitial Spaces 

Deadline: 3 January 2022

Exhibition: June 2022

Artistic fields Installation, practices of Listening, Outdoor Art, Sculpture, Social Practice, Painting, Visual Arts, Performance, Sound Art, Education, Interdisciplinary

Keywords Port cities, denied travel, interstitial spaces, diaspora, displacement, listening, micro-stories, post-colonialism

This open call welcomes artists and collectives to submit an artwork proposal for an intimate experimental festival that centres the harbour as conceptual framework and main stage. Hidden and fragmented micro-stories will be told along the interwoven paths that run throughout the harbour, that takes back its original meaning of lieu d'exchange, trying to challenge clichés ascribed to harbours as geographic and social milieu. Harbours are enchanted places but at the same time rough ones, a third space for who's leaving and who just came, interconnecting collective memories. Although still described as a crossroad of cultures and diaspora, this topos of a place for welcomes, farewells and mobility tout court has become a pandemic Utopia. Increased measures against migration led to port closures, travel limitations let us re-think the concept of proximity and the unexpected local revealed new exoticisms.   

In this liquid connected reality, it might be advisable to surrender to what pressed the stop button of the hypermobility of our social worlds. The most powerful tool against the constant drive for production at any cost is introspection: stopping and taking stock, becoming aware of the space and time between the productive things that cognitive capitalism has accumulated in a post-pandemic world. Looking back on ecology co-existing with us thrusts environmental issues into the realms of the individual, society, and humankind to examine the hidden scars underneath. 

Rather than the harbour as a symbol of the limitless possibility of direction, inception will be the "denied travel" in the state of suspense between here and there: a loss of compass. The interventions may relate to notions of time, suspension, displacement, diaspora, presence/absence, horror vacui, border closures and system(s) failure, but also community and counter-strategies.

The aim is to display and give voice to those fragmented polyphonic experiences that find in the isolated harbour their natural playground, enabling them to think about common feelings and struggles. The artworks will speak of deterritorialised people as a community to empathically transmit the shared sense of displacement that constitutes contemporary subjectivity. Does the presence gain new meanings through a denied travel? 

Floating in an opaque homogeneity, a rupture and its instability face the emergency to find a new navigation system to reposition ourselves. If we have lost the compass, we could even take advantage of this new perspective and enjoy the imaginative geographies of the mindscapes unfolding before us.

Can you feel nostalgia for a homeland you’ve never been to?                                                       

If the translocal impact of technological changes, social relations and political ideologies have fostered a novel sense of simultaneity and mutuality, do we still feel the need to travel?