Circularity, green infrastructure development, local production alongside global transport, scarcity and floods, invasive species and biodiversity preservation, salinization and various forms of pollution. Ports are ideal testbeds to explore how art-driven innovative solutions can address the different challenges from an ecosystem perspective. By taking on a pioneering role, ports can become the drivers for the transition to a robust water system. With this call, we aim to initiate a series of collaborations between artists, researchers, industries and local communities that lead to projects that raise awareness and/or provide concrete solutions to ecological and industrial challenges with regard to how we negotiate tensions regarding the use and treatment of (sweet, salt, waste and drinking) water, especially in port areas and the related waterways.
Discover all our regional challenges
In the framework of this project, GLUON in collaboration with a support network of companies, cultural initiatives and research institutions, are launching four residencies. Selected artists will have the unique opportunity to develop artistic projects for 9 months together with local experts that provide an answer and/or reflection on one of these 4 challenges:
Challenge #7 Keeping Heterotopia Afloat. Experiments in Modal Shift — How to open up the imagination on the power, beauty and importance of ecological and socially meaningful modal shift processes for more sustainable and livable futures? Imagine the canal of change for Brussels!
Challenge #8 S+T+ARTS Scheldt Valley. Cross- Cultural Collaborations with and for Water — How can we enhance our relationship to science, nature and water, as well as to arts as sacred and related, equally providing spiritually meaningful and revealing experiences which in themselves can be aesthetic and transformative, as our relationship with the world defines the values with which we encounter it?
Challenge #9 Coastal Culture and Science at Sea. Performing a Bridge to the Symbiocene — How can we involve and encourage everyone through experiments in performative futurology to actively preserve the ocean and waters for generations to come?
Challenge #10 Resilience on the Waterfront. Pioneering Ports and beyond — How can we introduce perspectives that go beyond human-centred views and that can create artistic expressions engaging different communities influencing the future water management of Europe’s second largest port: Port of Antwerp-Bruges?
Submit your proposal before 26 June 2023, midnight 23:59 CEST, if you are an artist who wants to contribute to a social and sustainable transition through experimental use of/or critical reflection on water research, collaboration, and digital developments.
