Open Call | Pixelache Helsinki Festival, Finland

Pixelache is a Transdisciplinary Platform for Emerging Art, Design, Research and Activism, organised by the non-profit association Piknik Frequency ry. It consists of an annual festival in Helsinki, as well as participatory art-science and technology productions, public events, educational programmes, residencies and other activities. Our non-profit association has operated since 2002, also named Pikseliähky. pixelache.ac/pages/about

Between 2021-2022, Pixelache will reach its 20th year anniversary, and Pixelache Helsinki Festival is currently one of the longest running interdisciplinary cultural festivals in Northern Europe and the Baltic Sea region. It continues to promote emergent inter- and trans-disciplinary practices and thinking between art, design, technology, research and activism.

Please note: Currently the festival have not gathered or developed a budget for the festival production at time of this first open call, April-May 2020, with feedback by the end of June 2020. If selected, they seek your permission to include your proposal in funding applications in Autumn 2020, to gather the support to make them happen.

All selected artists will be paid based on industry standard rates of the arts in Finland, with production and other costs negotiated as necessary.

> Pixelache’s 2020-21 Theme: #Burn___

#Burn___ is the thematic premise for the next two years of Pixelache’s cultural output as an association, it connects psychological, social and environmental collapse, and how we can survive it, developing resilience.

The programme is designed to give the possibility to different actors to interpret the theme ‘#Burn___’ in multiple ways, and continues our experiments in open and collaborative curation methods. We foresee the focus covering a wide spectrum of possibilities, from the personal to the social and extended systemic perspectives, including for example mental health and ecological states and conditions as related subjects.

> Read ‘A Letter fae the Other Side’
Poetic text by Andrew Gryf Paterson, to give hints of the scope of this theme in English, translated to Finnish / Swedish / Russian

Pixelache hope to address the #Burn____ theme via postmedia, participatory and somatic contemporary practices, mixing art, design, together with public services, social /-democratic activism, and commons-orientated action. They wish to facilitate a sharing- economy that is not exploitative and exhausting, asking about ethics. Rather than reduce, they consider and promote increasingly complex or non-mediated but network-facilitated exchanges, and commissioned artworks or actions.

It is confirmed that Pixelache Helsinki 2021 Festival will take place 6-13.6.2021, at Helsinki City’s new Central Library Oodi.

This exciting new public learning and leisure centre was voted last year as the best new library in the world, and is very popular with both locals and international visitors since it opened in December 2018. Pixelache hope this festival venue site will encourage you to think about all its spaces, active and passive, ordered and dynamic, as well as the diverse client-base and potential audience. Saturday 12th June is also Helsinki City Day, another very popular event day. Hence this Pixelache Festival will be very public.