Call for Contributions: Ruukuu | Everyday utopias and artistic research

In public discussion, a growing concern about the dissipation of political imagination and inability to envisage alternative futures has been articulated over the recent decades. Elements for imagining alternative social formations and futures seem restricted at this current conjuncture. The question of alternatives is, however, currently particularly acute as the climate emergency, growing social inequalities, pandemics, transformation of work and crisis of democracy push us to search for the prerequisites for ecologically and socially sustainable societies. On the one hand, the contemporary crises give rise to growing anxiety, dystopias and polarization of views, but on the other hand, they also animate the process of imagining alternative worlds and making and living utopias here and now.

Art is one of the pivotal arenas in which alternatives are imagined and performed. Art has a complex and multifaceted relationship to what is going on in society: it reflects and comments on, organizes and articulates, manifests and makes things happen. In this special issue, we are particularly interested in the many different forms and methods through which artistic practices and everyday utopias gesture towards the future.

We invite artist researchers from different disciplines to submit expositions for the special issue "Everyday utopias and artistic research".

Further information: http://ruukku-journal.fi/en/issues/utopiat/call