a TRACTS symposium hosted by the Helsinki Research Pavilion
September 11-12, 2025
Helsinki, Finland
Chairs: Otso Aavaranta (Uniarts Helsinki), Lee Douglas (Centre for Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths UoL), Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt University Berlin)
The TRACTS Network and Uniarts Helsinki Research Pavilion invite researchers and artists to participate in a two-day symposium to be in Helsinki on September 11-12, 2025. This event will bring together researchers and artists working at the art-academia interface to co-explore the prospects and challenges of creative modes of academic research as well as academic modes of artistic creation.
The art-academia interface is a porous, lively space of exchange and influence, but also of debate and demarcation. Academic epistemic practices have expanded towards the experiential and aesthetic domains traditionally nurtured by the arts, while artistic research has brought an agenda of enquiry and knowledge to scholarly pursuits. The points of intersection between diverse research practices and traditions is fertile terrain. Transdisciplinarity, however, is also marked by risks and pitfalls like the non-informed appropriation of methods, approaches or vocabularies; the instrumentalisation of art and aesthetics; and the blurring or obfuscation of ethical frameworks. At the same time, questions of quality, standards and assessment remain largely open on both sides of this equation.
The symposium is the culmination of TRACTS engagement with experimental research methods that think with and through the concept of trace. Approaching trace as a epistemological, methodological and ethical concept, TRACTS considers how the art-academic interface can provide room for innovative scholarship that addresses climate crisis, technological change, and social justice.
This symposium invites participants to collectively and forthrightly engage in mapping the art-academia interface through the presentation of case studies, experiments in form, and proposed roundtable discussions. We also accept proposals for performances, lectures, reports, workshops, curatorial proposals, screenings, and listening sessions.
Themes
We welcome contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Adventures and exchanges: Navigating the art-academia ecosystem/interface;
- Trace as a conceptual, methodological and ethical tool;
- Exploratory and practice-based research;
- Multimodality, experimentation, the politics of invention;
- Ethics and experimentality;
- Non-textual scholarship in a world of words;
- Appropriation and exploitation in art-academia interface;
- Beyond the instrumentalisation of art and aesthetics: rethinking interdisciplinarity;
- Methodological openness: exploring how open and experimental can research be;
- Risky methodologies and epistemological exchanges;
- Intersections between epistemic, art and creative practice;
- The shape of sound: experiments in acoustic research and practice;
- Archives as sites of/for practice-based research;
- Experiments in form: multimodality in and beyond academic research;
- Performance and performativity;
- Emdodiment and bodies;
- Critical ecologies, multispecies ethnographies, and plant relations
Who Should Apply?
We invite researchers, artists, and practitioners working at the intersection of artistic and academic research. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches and innovative, multimodal, or non-textual forms of scholarship.
How to Apply
Please submit your application by 16 March 2025 to tracts@st-andrews.ac.uk. Your submission should include:
- Name & affiliation — independent artists and scholars also welcome
- Short bio (max 200 words)
- Description of research or practice (max 300 words) — This should address how your work, practice and/or interests relate to the symposium’s themes and outline specific questions or challenges you wish to explore.
- Format — The symposium will provide room to present case studies, projects, and experiments in form. As such, we accept proposals for presentations, roundtables, performances, installations, and workshops. Please indicate how you would like to present your work and make note of any technical support you may need. If you are proposing something that requires a specific kind of space, this should also be described.
- Please indicate if you need funding to participate in this event.
Funding
A limited number of funding opportunities will be available for symposium participants affiliated with the TRACTS network.
We will announce the participants by the end of April 2025.
TRACTS (Trace as a Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice) is a COST Action (2021–2025) that brings together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, arts, activism, and law to bridge cultural, political, and geographical gaps in research on traces. TRACTS is an open network, and new members are welcome.
The 2025 Uniarts Research Pavilion: Polymorphic Artistic Research marks the 10th anniversary of the Research Pavilion project, an international and cross-institutional platform for processes, discussions, and collaborations in the field of artistic research. The RP#6 highlights the richness and variety of forms and agencies within artistic research. It takes the form of a relay of events in different locations and formats.
Building on bottom-up processes, the RP#6 programme will expose art-as-research via research exhibitions and performative settings. Discursive and conceptual dimensions are fostered within symposia and discussion events. A year-long research seminar nurtures the pedagogical rooting of artistic research, while a field trip and outdoor events are organised to delve into the material entanglements of artistic research. Together, this string of relayed events displays the polymorphic vitality of artistic research– a liquid entity that refuses to settle down into formal normativity.