The Visual Research Network, in association with the Estonian National Museum, will hold the 3rd edition of the VRN residency and conference in Tartu, Estonia from June 12th to June 19th, 2022. This year’s theme – Encounters with the Urban Night: multisensory ethnographies of shadow and alterity – invites researchers and creative practitioners to engage with the alternative dimensions of the urban as encountered in their research, fieldwork or artistic productions, where the notion of an urban night is explored within the broadest framing of cultural, social, behavioural and sensorial phenomena.
Application deadline: 7 April, 2022
Successful applications notification: 20 April, 2022
This event will seek to showcase new perspectives and approaches that visual/sensory practitioners, researchers and PhD students are currently employing in their work and/or seeking to explore in new contexts. The format of a residency/conference creates an ideal environment to explore various approaches to both theory and practice, with each shaping and influencing the other through a cycle of action and reflection. With pandemic–related restrictions being lifted around the world, the VRN invites researchers and practitioners to Tartu just before summer solstice and the shortest night of the year, to study the urban night in a moment of resurgence.
For the conference, the VRN is looking for films of all lengths and research paper abstracts that tie together themes of alterity, identity and sensoriality within the context of the nocturnal, especially those that deal with elements of the urban night.
Meanwhile, participants in the residency will be aiming to produce original work that revolves around the same themes of alterity, identity and sensoriality, but specifically in the context of Tartu’s urban night.
To enrich participants’ experience, the VRN advocates for visual, sonic, experimental, multisensory and cross-disciplinary knowledge. The encounters that the residency and conference promise represent an opportunity for anthropologists, sensory research practitioners and artists to broaden their horizons toward new methodologies and sensibilities through a shared, collaborative learning experience.
VRN welcomes submissions from applicants for either or both the residency and conference.
For more information, visit the VRN website.
The descent of darkness, the arrival of sleep, the suspension of work mark [nighttime] out as time of fear, of rest and of dreaming. Such a crucial ordering structure in traditional society – night following day – makes it, as with all boundaries, a site of transgression. It is a space and time of the other; the other self, other people, and the other economy, but it is also a space of encounter with this other.
Andy Lovatt & Justin O’Connor (1995)