INTERAKCIJE 2024: Tourism – New Dynamics (Call for participation)
An event organised in collaboration with Erasmus+ European project Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF).
Location: Arts Academy, University of Split, Croatia
Dates: 5-8 November 2024
Application deadline: September 29
Confirmation: no later than October 3
Questions: interakcije@umas.hr
Event
This 4-day intensive event will host lectures, discussions and a workshop for master, and postgraduate students, researchers, and emerging practitioners engaged with creative practices across diverse fields such as architecture, design, arts, digital technologies, psychology, social and natural sciences, and all other applicants from any field/background who feel that could contribute to this topic. Interakcije 2024 will be held at the Department of Visual Communication Design at the Arts Academy, University of Split (Croatia). The workshop will be conducted in the English language. The workshop outcomes will be featured on the Erasmus+ European project Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF) website. More about last year’s Interakcije 2023 event HERE. Upon successful completion of the workshop, participants have the opportunity to earn 2 ECTS points.
Participation in the workshop is free of charge. Travel, accommodation and food are on the behalf of participants. The maximum number of participants is limited to 24, and the application deadline is 29 September.
Topic
Today, it is difficult to find a place with a cultural or natural heritage in the Mediterranean that is not under great pressure from the unstoppable tourism that is changing the way of life in this part of the world. Most of the fetishized tourist destinations in the Mediterranean irreversibly depend on only one service sector – tourism. In the 21st century, the outcomes of tourism are widely visible and critically discussed, from the relocation of the local population from the historic city centres, along with the gentrification and Disneyfication of the same, the increase in the cost of living for the local population, to extreme pressure on the local infrastructure, turning the local population into 2nd class citizens. In the post-Covid world, we witness daily examples of the outcomes of excessive tourism, from mass protests in Palma de Mallorca, Venice entry fee, to this summer’s closure of the Acropolis in Athens due to queues combined with extreme heat. In addition to “tourist disasters”, climate changes are inevitable, which will be especially strong in the European part of the Mediterranean, with rising air and sea temperatures, which will bring extreme changes to the sea and coast, irreversibly changing one of the most desirable climates and natural parts of Europe.
Possible specific topics that we will deal with in the context of the local near future…
- bottom-up activist and artistic reactions
- reactions of local authorities (regulations, fees, fines…)
- seasonable life (summer versus winter)
- infrastructure (transport, water, waste, healthcare…)
- domestic crafts and local production
- resistance (guerrilla actions)
- building resilience
- …
Faculty
The event is hosted by Ivica Mitrović and Oleg Šuran (Arts Academy, University of Split). The workshop will be divided into two groups one led by the Split team and the other by the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture group (Andrej Radman, Heidi Sohn and Stavros Kousoulas). Discursive programme guests (lectures and discussions) are Lidija Petrić (Faculty of Economics, Business, and Tourism, University of Split) and Mario Vrbančić (Department of English Language and Literature, University of Zadar).
Interakcije
Interakcije (Eng. Interactions) is an informal educational platform at the Department of Visual Communication Design at the Arts Academy in Split, connected with its master program, aiming to go beyond the limits of design definitions and re-thinking what design is today. Activities started in 2001 (during summer school at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) with the first event in 2004 – the International Interaction Design Summer School “Convivio – Communities in Transition”. The platform was a part of various European projects, collaborations and events such as the UrbanIxD project (2013 – 2014), the SpeculativeEdu project (2018 – 2021) and the discursive programme of the Croatian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2023). Among others, hosted many workshop leaders and lecturers: James Auger, Tuur Van Balen, Nelly Ben Hayoun, Nicolas Nova, Liam Young, Noam Toran, Tobias Revell, Anab Jain, Demitrios Kargotis and Dash Macdonald (Dashndem), Michael Smyth, Steffen P. Walz, Chris Hand, Victor Vina, Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson (Unsworn industries), Gordan Savičić, Martin Avila, Liam Healy, Dionysia Mylonaki, Gennaro Asscione and many more.
SUrF
Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF) is a pedagogical project that investigates the role and purpose of design in the 21st century – understood as an ecology of knowing, imagining and making that is deeply involved in the complex worlding dynamics that shape contemporary urban reality. Project partners: Centre de Recherche en Design (CRD), ENS/ENSCI (Paris); TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture; ELISAVA (Barcelona); Estonian Association of Architects (EAA) (Tallinn) and Arts Academy, University of Split.