Suoja / Shelter Festival-Laboratory vol.3

This 3-day international annual festival-laboratory will be held for the third time, and for the first time in the online format.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAME of the 3rd edition of Suoja/ Shelter Festival-Laboratory is an affective take on the history of computation and its relation to power, control, political agency, and sovereignty. Historical narratives confine the past into narrow cells, fitting its body into casting molds in order to fulfil the urge for orientation in the course of time, to serve identity-forming functions, and to define an imaginable course of actions guided by the agency of historical knowledge. Past serves the above sublime cause, but it might not abate its suffering in a stringent cage, and the pressure of confinement might trigger its response to be hysterical when such significant phenomena as computation arise, and crises, revolutions, cognitive dissonances, and ontological shifts follow.

The pandemic just accelerated the processes of the data economy: while the public attention is focused on an illness, its deficits, as well as pre-lockdown matters, such as the pitfalls of surveillance-capitalism withdraw to latency. At this point, it is even more tipical than before, that the establishment of technological sovereignty is the very basis for maintaining democracy as we know or imagine it.

Drawing on the concept of “really useful knowledge“ originating in radical educational movements of the early nineteenth-century England, and the notion of the Situation Room, a place with the aim to provide its users with current intelligence to resolve crises, Suoja /Shelter Festival-Laboratory sets up a twofold online structure to foster collective “self-help” in these h_st_rical times.

Moving online, the Festival is creating a space for performative experiments, discussions, immersive interactions; welcoming the diversity of artistic practices which can reidentify themselves for a digital space; offering to make it is a tryout with a prospect to continue working with the same topic, but on a bigger scale, during the future offline event. The organisers believe that every safe space can be only a temporary measure to surmount crisis and to gain strength to meet reality. Being concerned by the trend of the devaluation of artistic labour by cutting wages for online work, they try their best to sustain a fair allowance for every participant.

Currently, Suoja/Shelter Festival-Laboratory is calling for video / sound / computer / net / performing art, and artistic research for its third edition. Artists / Researchers of any age, gender, nationality and country of residence are invited to participate. The working language is English.