12-13 November 2015 at Malmö Inter Arts Center

12-13 November 2015 at Malmö Inter Arts Center

The two-day symposium Participatory Practices in Arts and Architecture wants to reexamine the issue of participation in contemporary art and architecture practices. In recent decades, art and architecture’s engagement with concerned publics and communities have manifested in range of different ways. These participatory efforts have also been frequently criticized by political scientists, geographers, planning theorists, architects, artists, and art theorists: instead of creating more democratic spatial processes and outcomes, it has been argued that citizen dialogue processes fail to have long-lasting effects or even become complicit in the agenda of neoliberal urban redevelopment. Against these criticisms, it can instead be argued that a range of participatory possibilities exist today which might fruitfully be explored, even if the outcomes of such exploration is not immediately calculable. This symposium attempts—in contrast to views that either look at short-term utilitarian solutions or take their point of departure in negative or dystopian lines of thinking about collaboration—to reread ‘participation’ through the concepts of translation, listening, and urban curating, concepts which demand the unearthing of alternative approaches to participatory practice.

The symposium will take on various formats such as keynote lectures, reviews of projects, participatory research actions and roundtables. PhD students will recieve course credits for participating.

Invited guests are Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam), Susanne Hofmann/Die Baupiloten (Berlin), Stina Nyberg & Sofia Wiberg (Stockholm).

The event is organized by Apolonija Šušteršic, Gunnar Sandin and Meike Schalk and supported by ResArc (the Swedish school of architectural research), Architecture in Effect (research environment at KTH, Stockholm), Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Faculty of Urban Design, KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment Stockholm and Inter Arts Center, Malmö.

For more info, see the program (pdf) and the course description (pdf).