UArtes and Cumulus have joined efforts to launch this current year the second international virtual conference of the network on Arts and Community. The conference seeks to promote academic reflections and artistic performances focusing on different ways of working with local communities. The conference would like to invite artists, scholars, professors, and researchers to share their experiences and reflections on this matter, pre, during and after the pandemic. Research tracks can be found below. Please consider the proposals can be submitted as theoretical, performative and/or hybrid- innovative presentations that contribute to address the questions below.
For UArtes is important to focus on inter-learning experiences that connect communities over outreach programmes and projects. We create community projects that, through arts education, enable collective construction of knowledge, encourage know-how exchanges, and promote participation for social transformation.
In our outreach programs we seek, from the arts perspective, to provide solutions to: interculturality, gender and diversity, memory, ancestral languages, public space, cultural rights, inclusion or identity and environmental related problems. To do so, UArtes works with priority targeted groups particularly: children and adolescents, indigenous populations and nationalities, people affected by violence, people with disabilities, migrant populations, communities sitting on defenceless territories, and people deprived of liberty. We build working networks with government institutions, educational system establishments, community, and international cooperation organisations. These projects have resulted in an outstanding creative production in/from/with the communities themselves, which fortify the sense of public education in the arts as a right.
Benefits submitting your contribution
UArtes is one of the four Latin-American public universities dedicates solely to the Arts. We have become a hub for artistic research in the region.
Submitting your work at this conference and attending will give you the following benefits:
- Provide you with more visibility among other researchers from all over the world. Participating to this conference will allow you to expand your professional network, increasing potential further collaboration and interaction with peers.
- Become familiar with UArtes’ approach within the Community Outreach programs and Research programs, join our international projects.
- Publish your work with our Editorial platform, and disseminate your work within Latin-American networks and research communities.
- Stay in touch with UArtes and become aware of our next events and activities.
Tracks
Track 1: Crisis, criticism, and creation
Our present has emerged as a time of crises: economic, geopolitical, epistemological, sanitarian, and climate. Such crises are so dramatically intertwined that it becomes difficult to imagine concrete alternatives. However, a crisis is not the end of the world, but rather an opportunity to critically reflect on it and the genealogy that has led us to our current state. And, because the best defence is a good offense, criticism, therefore, should be first of all a way of rethinking and redesigning the Age in which we live, radically changing our point of view and our outlook with respect to the future. If design is intended to make visible the invisible, to design the future is to make visible what will happen after the crisis, creating the social and cultural conditions for its completion. In this sense, it is particularly important to identify those crucial agents or issues that could be addressed in order to begin the process of re-imagining the world. We ask, then, starting from a local perspective, is it possible to establish the South as a strategical place of enunciation to reconcile critical analysis of the present with acts of creation? Which social experiences, artistic practices and activist projects seem to embody, within the crisis, this effort? Which theoretical and artistic trajectories are committed to a counter-hegemonic critique of the present that could also be considered a creation?
This call is a call to artists, scholars, teachers and researchers to propose theoretical, performative and/or document-artistic presentations that work from the proposed questions.
Keywords: Global crisis, counter-hegemony, design thinking, social engagement in arts, imagination-creation.
Track 2: Production Design in the Arts
In a global atmosphere oscillating between confinement and fears of new COVID-19 outbreaks, an emphasis has been drawn on the aestheticized and fictional forms of products exhibited and distributed on social media and digital platforms. However, in the face of the permanent presence of virtuality, the doubt arises about whether the use of technological tools traversing artistic production diffuses the breach between art buffs, emergent artists, and professionals. This problem remarks the way friendly and open software, apps or interfaces resolved the needs of creators once they reach technological competences in artistic design, reflection and composition.
Since creative processes’ times and freedoms have been altered as a result of the lack of physical exchanging and conviviality, our challenge is to project ourselves towards a sustainable popular economy or a self-income generation model through fairs, garage sales or auctions, amongst other actions/strategies, that could result in partnership affiliation and cooperative movement, that could enable regional networks activation.
This call invites artiststs; scholars; professors; researchers to propose theoretical, performative and/or hybrid innovative presentations that contribute to this topic. DJs; artistic producers; sound, stage or animation designers; and visual artists in general are invited to share their archives and proposals in regard to self-publishing, understanding of algorithms, marketing logics in order to position an inclusive brand that, in some occasions, turns out even profitable thanks to the support of endorsers that legitimize inside a complex and saturated market.
Key words: DJ, transdisciplinary design, rent, influencers, co-creation, digital strategies.
Track 3: Art, nature, biology and technology
If the decade beginning in 2010 can be thought as the crucial period of smartification, of social media dominance, and the awareness of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene, then 2020 and the pandemic has in turn obligated us to reorient our attention towards biology and its direct effects on our physical health. At the same time, technology has totally reconfigured our social and individual environment. We live in a new era of the screens or, as Naomi Klein defines it in “Screen New Deal”. During quarantine and the forced lockdown caused by the sanitary emergency, we came towards a social and painful atomization; we are still far from comprehending its long-term effects, but it immediately makes us more aware than ever before of a simultaneously yearned-for and avoided otherness. In this framework, the arts and design are driven to rethink the relations between technology, the environment and biology. In this context of a Damaged Planet (Haraway), the ambition of passing from the expression of one’s own cosmovision and the self, to the concrete design of a pluriversal (McKenzie, Mignolo), multi-specific (Margulis) and perspectivist (Viveiros de Castro) world becomes strategic. In this respect, and given that it would be a political error to reduce the role of the arts merely to its aesthetic dimension, we find ourselves moving towards a great cosmopolitical question: How should we think bioethically and biopolitically about the relations between life/lives, technologies and creation? Besides, and turning back to more general aspects, we ask ourselves what sense is there in making art in a «Damaged Planet»? How should we handle, politically and artistically, the possibilities of designing worlds provided by the digital, while, at the same time, fighting against its totalitarian tendencies of control? Which opportunities for a world to come arise from artistic practices, Latin American “artivism” and the epistemologies of the Global South?
This call is a call to artists, scholars, professors and researchers to propose theoretical, performative and/or document-artistic presentations that work from the proposed questions.
Key words: Smartification, World design and worlding, cosmopolitics, artivism, southern epistemologies.
Track 4: Urban art and redesigning cities
For several decades, the urban landscape has become a territory of disputes and a place for the articulation of relationships which range from the political and emotional to the aesthetic. To this extent, the resonance of creative expressions on the streets are ever more deserving of a profound and careful analysis. In this sense, visual phenomena like the ‘Ganchos’ from Monterrey, the ‘Pichação’ in Sao Paulo and the ‘Chapeteo’ in Guayaquil Ecuador, amongst others, provide proof of organic and regional cultural processes that, albeit stemming from the Bronxs’ boom in New York (Castleman), configure a regional graffiti typology, framed within a specific socio-political context.
Taking into account the current state of urban design and how this has impacted on the way art is produced, it is now relevant to review the ways in which this intervention has impacted on the production; this includes amongst others graffiti and urban art as part of the contemporary repertoire shown on street walls.
Graffiti is an unstoppable cultural process that maintains an open and direct dialogue with the physical and social architecture of its territories. It presents itself as a strategy and methodology for diverse processes of creative exploration. Different types of graffiti such as; ‘Caligraffiti’, ‘Laser Tag’, ‘Led Throwie’ and ‘Electrograf’ are the result of these primary inquiries, which include the use of new technologies.
Therefore, we must ask ourselves, to what extent is design inserted into these forms of creative production? To what extent are urban art and graffiti configured as a space for graphic resistance? To what extent are they a means of exploration of new ways of creative intervention in the urban landscape?
This call is an open call to artists, scholars, professos and researchers to propose theoretical, performative and/or hybrid innovative presentations that respond to the proposed questions. Graffiti artists, urban artists, programmers, researchers, and curators at a local, regional and international level are invited to submit their reflections around these contemporary visual practices.
Key words: Urban art, city, public space, laser tag, graffiti, design
General Information and important dates
- Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Virtual Conference “Arts imagining communities to come” will be held from the 8th to the 11th of November, 2021.
- The conference will be entirely online and will be in Spanish and English.
- Contributions can be presented as an academic paper or artistic performance, or hybrid (academic paper and artistic performance)
- Option 1: Academic paper
Call for abstracts, 500 – 1000 words. References excluded + 5 key words
Please consider abstracts must be in English or Spanish. - Option 2: Artistic performance
Call for artistic presentation/work. Text and performance.
Text must be in English or Spanish, 500- 1000 words; performance in English or Spanish, if any.
We ecourage authors to submit digital resources such as videos, audio, recordings, images, animations, etc. - Option 3: Hybrid (academic presentation and/of artistic performance; any other innovative format could be considered)
Abstracts must be in English or Spanish, 500- 1000 words; performance in English or Spanish, if any.
For further info, please see below “Submission guidelines for proposals”.
- Option 1: Academic paper
- Please submit your applications to internacionales@uartes.edu.ec until June 30th, 2021. Please specify the subject of the email: Cumulus GYE 2021_ type of proposal (please specify: paper or artistic performance or hybrid format)
- The notification of selected proposals will be sent on August 30th through email.
- Final date for full paper submission/ artistic work will be: 1st October, 2021 .
Submission guidelines for proposals
UArtes and the Cumulus network is looking for contributions from academics, artists, scholars, professors and researchers that respond to the tracks mentioned above.
There are three types of contributions:
For academic papers submission, only abstracts are requested. They must be submitted in English or Spanish in pdf format until June 15th to our email address internacionales@uartes.edu.ec
After your proposal is selected, full academic paper will be asked in English or in Spanish using the templates and the guideliness provided for October 1st, 2021. The structure of academic papers should include an introduction, theoretical background, methodology, results, and conclusions describing contributions to new knowledge.
Final academic papers should have minimun 2500 and up to 3000 words (abstract and references excluded but figures and tables included) + 5 Keywords. Formats should be in both a.doc (x) and .pdf files, including authors names and affiliations. Please keep in mind the content must be an unpublished work.
If English is not your first language, or you are not fluent in references, we urge you to send your paper to Scribendi www.scribendi.com or a similar proof-reader before submission. We expect clarity in terms of establishing context, explaining methodology, reporting results and exposing conclusions. The author must follow Chicago standards for formatting and style guide: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html. Please follow the template available on our website.
The authors of all the selected proposals will be invited to present their work at the Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Conference “Arts Imagining Communities to Come”. Participation will include a discount on the registration fee. Consider that final paper work can be handed back to their authors so he or she is able to correct typos or errors before the conference.
Finally, abstracts of academic papers will go through a double- bind review. Therefore, both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers and vice versa.
We hope to feature works from a wide array of disciplines. Proposals that do not fit traditional academic paper publication format are highly encouraged.
Authors/artists can submit one or multiple digital resources of the performance. These resources may include video, audio, any form of recording, images, animations, etc. Submitted performances may be completed (no longer than 40 min) or work-in-progress. Regarded completed works, they can be already developed works that fit one of the tracks mentioned above, or they also can be artistic performances produced for this specific call.
Digital resources should be sent as follows:
- Film, video or animation: Two-minute excerpt or teaser from the full work in Full HD (1920 x 1080) in .mov or .mp4 format.
- Audio, field recordings: Full work or excerpt in .wav format, CD quality (16-bit, 44.1kHz)
- Images: High-quality .jpg or .png format, max. 20 MB file size.
- Link to any platform (youtube, vimeo, etc.) where the content has been uploaded.
Submissions must also include a text document describing the artistic performance and an explanation of its link to one of the tracks mentioned above. Text should be between 500 to 1000 words in English or Spanish. Please send the text in .pdf format. Performance resources should be sent through a WeTransfer link or a link where the work is uploaded. Please send this to our email address internacionales@uartes.edu.ec .
Selected works will be announced by email on August 30th at the latest through email.
The authors/artists of all the selected proposals will be invited to present their work at the Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Conference “Arts Imagining Communities to Come”. Participation will include a discount on the registration fee.
Performances will go through a blind review.
Abstracts and digital resources of the performance (if any) are requested. Abstracts must be submitted in English or Spanish in pdf format, and resources may include video, audio, any form of recording, images, animations, etc. The deadline for submission is June 15th and the materials should be sent to our email address internacionales@uartes.edu.ec
Digital resources should be sent as follows:
- Film, video or animation: Two-minute excerpt or teaser from the full work in Full HD (1920 x 1080) in .mov or .mp4 format.
- Audio, field recordings: Full work or excerpt in .wav format, CD quality (16-bit, 44.1kHz)
- Images: High-quality .jpg or .png format, max. 20 MB file size.
- Link to any platform (youtube, vimeo, etc.) where the content has been uploaded.
Selected works will be announced by email on August 30th at the latest through email.
The authors/artists of all the selected proposals will be invited to present their work at the Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Virtual Conference “Arts Imagining Communities to Come”. Participation will include a discount on the registration fee.
Works will go through a blind review.
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About publication policy and proceedings
All selected academic papers and/or artistic performances will be published in our digital proceedings. The publication will have an ISSN/ISBN number and a DOI refrence to ensure they appear in scholarly web-searches and it will be accessible from the conference website.
Our digital proceedings will be accessible to all the public from from January 2022 in the conference website and will include the participation of the key note speakers.
Authors and artists should manifest that the text/performance they present is of their own authorship and that they respect the intellectual property rights of third parties. Likewise, they must authorize the use of the material for the conference and conference publications.
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