Encounters with the Urban Night
3rd International Residency Conference, Estonia 2022

Encounters with the Urban Night: multisensory ethnographies of shadow and alterity

Janus am I; oldest of potentates!
Forward I look and backward and below
I count as god of avenues and gates
The years that through my portals come and go.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 
The descent of darkness, the arrival of sleep, the suspension
of work mark [nighttime] as a time of fear,
of rest and of dreaming.
Such a crucial ordering – night following day –
makes it, as with all boundaries, a site of transgression.
It is a space and time of the other; the other self, other people,
and the other economy, but it is also a
space of encounter with this other.”

 Andy Lovatt & Justin O’Connor (1995)

The Visual Research Network, in association with the Estonian National Museum, will hold the 3rd edition of the VRN residency and conference in Tartu, Estonia from June 12th to June 19th, 2022. This year’s theme of Urban Night invites researchers and creative practitioners to engage with the alternative dimensions of the urban as encountered in their research, fieldwork or artistic productions, where the notion of an urban night is explored within the broadest framing of cultural, social, behavioural and sensorial phenomena.

Partners