Eco Island Amager – Appels à participation

– Atlas of an Eco Island – Mapping Amager and Sharing Copenhagen – 

Call for participation

Transects & seminars // Eco-creation Camp & Seminar // Publication

Amager, Copenhagen

Aug. 20th-21st–22nd // Sept. 17th-18th–19th // Oct. 31st-Nov. 1st, 2014

Cultura21 Nordic, the Copenhagen-based branch of Cultura21 International, calls for presentations, texts, artistic interventions, and action-based reflections, linked to the events under the project Eco Island Amager (part of Sharing Copenhagen/Copenhagen as European Green Capital 2014). We invite scholars, policy makers, urban planners, activists, artists, designers, trans-disciplinarists and action-researchers of all kinds, to take part in seminars and collaborative action around a series of 6 transects and an innovation camp, processes which are highly practice-oriented, innovative and experimental. Please submit your proposals by June 20th, 2014. Notification of acceptance by June 29th.

The Field: urban living and change, mapping, cultures of sustainability

With this call, we wish to open up to fresh visions, so that we may develop common methods and bring new reflections and creative wisdom to Amager. We also hope that the participants may take back inspiration to their own practices, and strengthen networks of interventionists in urban ecologies, across localities and disciplines.

On the island of Amager and in Copenhagen, we find all types of approaches and actors dealing with issues of sustainability, calling for interpretation and reflective, critical, and creative feedback. This makes it an ideal site for trans-disciplinary urban experiments and learning.

Setting: The Eco island in the Green Capital

In 2014, Copenhagen holds the title of European Green Capital. Sharing Copenhagen is the name of the program for Copenhagen as Green Capital. Sharing is strategically seen as a form of promoting Copenhagen, as well as an invitation to take part, to give and receive.The Eco Island Amager project seeks to explore what being part of a capital with ambitions of sustainability might imply, if you take it to a local and trans-local perspective. What if Amager were truly an eco-island? How and who defines if it is one? We seek to investigate that through a series of interventions on an island where intertwining ecosystems influence each other through movements, places, and agents, that may remain invisible to one another. The primary goal of the project is to make way for new or strengthened innovative projects on the island of Amager, which would be locally based, but addressing global issues, and to build bridges across disciplines, interests, initiatives, and people.

Call for participation: reflection, action, presentation, publication

We invite actors with an interest in sustainability in mapping, culture, and transdisciplinary urban renewal processes, to present us with their suggestions for participation. We invite you to participate as you may wish to combine them, in the following activities. From April to November, a series of interventions are to run, in order to further the process and to which we invite you to participate and contribute:

• 6 open transects (site-specific explorations), in particular areas of the island, which will engage us in the question of the eco-island and each particular zone;

• Eco Creation Conference Amager, on October 31st – November 1st, where we will draw the knowledge and foundations from the previous phases.

Transects: participation, symposium, artistic intervention

In connection to the 6 transects in August and September, we ask for interventions for a symposium following the transect itself. As every transect focuses on specific themes, we invite you to decide which one would fit best with your interests and area of focus. It is possible to participate in all 6 transects, but we ask you to prepare an intervention for only one of them. Attached you find the calendar, with the specific locations and themes for each transect day (August 20th, 21st, 22nd , September 17th, 18th, 19th).

Please send us your suggestions, indicating the transect, the theme that you wish to bring in, which format your intervention will need – e.g. a talk for the symposium; or more experimental formats. We do encourage artists and others to suggest art-based interventions that might take place during the transect itself, calling to reflect on it from an alternative viewpoint.

Please send us your suggestions in no more than 100 words, by June 20th, 2014. Not the least, we invite you to be not only visitors to the project, but also to take part in the process, entering the dynamics and nature of the places, and to become yourselves bridges back to the areas, sites, institutions, islands or cities in which you work.

The Eco-Creation Conference Amager: presentations, workshop interventions

We are also inviting you to propose contributions to the Eco-Creation Conference that will take place on October 31st to November 1st. The conference will mark the transition from the exploring part of the project, to the iteration of a number of specific projects. Therefore, we call for interventions that will give inspiration to project holders and everyone involved in the process, for the first day of the camp. As this event will be cross-local, you may consult the full list of themes relevant to one or more of the specific transect zones. We invite to scholarly or artistic interventions, or ones that transcend the limits between the two. We ask you to bring in your experience and cases from other places, so that the Amager-based projects may draw on learning in e.g. indigenous cultures, other urban islands, eco-island projects, neighborhood transitions. We will be very pleased to have participants that are able to return for the eco-creation camp, after having participated in one of the transects in August or September. But if this is not possible, we also accept participation in the last event only. If mutual inspiration arises, the project holders and the external intervener may form alliances to develop their projects. Please send us your proposals for interventions, by June 20th, 2014.

Publications – call for editorial co-creation

We invite all those who participate in the event and project, to enter with proposals for a coming publication, under the working title of Atlas Amager and the Eco Island, which may also include collaboration with an academically oriented journal. We will gather reflections on the potential creation of Eco Island Amager, on similar initiatives in other cities, or other islands, as well as theoretical considerations and strategic action plans, and much more.

Practical information

Please submit proposals, reflections, and suggestions for collaboration by June 20th, 2014. All notifications of acceptance will be given by June 30th. If you wish to participate without making a presentation or other form of intervention, this is also possible. Please send a mail with a description of your interest in the project and indicate when you would like to participate. Submit by e-mail to ecoamager(at)cultura21.dk. The calendar for the transects, as well as information on venues, fees, sponsors, contact and support can be found on the project website.