TRACTS WG2 symposium
September 11-12, 2025
Helsinki, Finland
Chairs: Otso Aavaranta (Uniarts Helsinki), Lee Douglas (Centre for Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths UoL), Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The TRACTS Network is pleased to partner with the Uniarts Research Pavilion in Helsinki for a two-day symposium on experimental approaches to trace. This event will bring together researchers and artists working at the intersection of art and academia to explore the potentials and challenges of creative approaches to academic research and scholarly approaches to artistic practice.
The art–academia interface is a porous, dynamic space—one of exchange and influence, but also of debate and demarcation. Academic epistemologies increasingly draw from experiential and aesthetic realms traditionally cultivated by the arts, while artistic research brings critical inquiry and knowledge production into conversation with scholarly methods. This convergence generates fertile ground for collaboration, yet transdisciplinary work also entails risks: the uncritical appropriation of methods or vocabularies, the instrumentalisation of art and aesthetics, and the blurring of ethical frameworks. Meanwhile, questions of quality, evaluation, and standards remain open and contested on both sides.
This symposium marks the culmination of TRACTS’ ongoing engagement with experimental research practices informed by the concept of the trace—understood as an epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenge. Through this lens, we seek to examine how the art–academia nexus can foster innovative scholarship in response to urgent issues such as climate crisis, technological transformation, and social justice.
The symposium will feature the keynote, Facing Traces, by Tuula Närhinen and Nina Liebenberg, and will unfold across four interwoven thematic tracks. These include explorations of ecologies and water, reflections on arts research and practice-based inquiry, critical engagements with ethics and methods, and investigations into situated sonic practice and audiovisual experiments. Talks, performances, and presentations within each track will offer diverse entry points into the key questions and topics of the symposium.
