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Landscapes of Repair: Call for Art Interventions

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Landscapes of Repair: Call for Art Interventions Landscapes of Repair online exhibition Deadline: 31 May 2021
Landscapes of Repair: Call for Art Interventions
© forumZFD

We invite contributions to an online exhibition on landscapes of repair in Kosovo and the Western Balkans, opening July 2021. We are interested in showcasing five existing works by Kosovo-based artists that represent or engage with the exhibition theme via a variety of artistic media suitable for the Kunstmatrix platform, including photography, short films, recorded spoken word and multimedia.

Landscapes of Repair project

Landscapes of Repair is a collaborative project on post-traumatic landscapes in Kosovo, arising from a partnership between the University of Sheffield and the international NGO forumZFD. The project links University of Sheffield research on post-traumatic landscapes together with forumZFD’s expertise in dealing with the past in Kosovo and the Western Balkans. Landscapes of Repair seeks to establish a collaborative platform through the involvement of local, regional and international researchers, civil society actors, local communities and artists with a focus on post-traumatic place-making and the construction, availability and transformation of public space within post-conflict Kosovo. Foregrounding the localised reclamation of spaces that have been shaped by trauma in the region, the project fosters academic research, documentation, and the articulation of civil society actors in the context of landscape repair as signifier of local, regional, and international socio-political dynamics.

Exhibition

The exhibition forms one of three outputs of this ongoing collaborative project. Alongside a (i) symposium and (ii) e-publication on the same themes, the (iii) exhibition seeks to engage with civil, artistic and cultural responses to dealing with the past in Kosovo and the Western Balkans, reparative processes of local memorialisation and architectural reconstruction, and the reclaiming of public space by those who create, occupy and use it.

Each contributing artist will receive a 400 EURO honoraria for their contribution, and will be asked to contribute a pre-recorded or live talk based on their artwork at the accompanying symposium. Proposed contributions should not exceed 1-5 MB, and should respond to any of the following questions:

  • What is the visible and invisible impact of conflict and trauma on the built environment, architecture and public places?
  • How are post-conflict landscapes implicated in processes of local memorialisation, reoccupation and repair?
  • What does repair look like in the post-traumatic landscapes of Kosovo and the Western Balkans? 
  • What are the possibilities afforded by creative practice in critically engaging these places in the present?
  • How might we build landscapes of care or architectures of peace that contribute to positive social change in the region?
  • How can we prevent place from being instrumentalised as a tool of ethnonationalism?

Please submit your responses to the Google application form here by 31 May 2021. Please direct any
questions to emily-rose.baker@sheffield.ac.uk.

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