RUUKKU CALL: Responsibility

Responsibility intertwines with the essential questions of power, historicities, control, freedom, availability and care, which accompany the acknowledgement that we inhabit this planet with other people, species and materials. In the context of artistic research, collective or individual, responsibility can be understood as a standpoint or as an attitude that activate critical thinking and diversity of caring practices.

This issue of RUUKKU explores the various ideas, interpretations and possibilities of responsibility, as it is related to artistic research activities. The responsibility can be conceived in relation to artist-researcher themselves or to an artwork: what might it mean to revisit established ideas from a new perspective, or to produce thinking, knowledge, experience, perhaps new praxes and poetics from this perspective? Responsibility can be also considered as a topical attitude within a particular research process, or in relation to larger contexts and realms of art, politics and society. Alternatively the expositions can redefine the practices of responsibility: What might responsibility mean for everyday practices in the time when the entire life in the planet needs urgent reconsideration? What kind of caring activities the responsible life in this planet might entail? How does artistic research embrace the enmeshed relationship between humans and environment, including its difference from non-human actors? 

The RUUKKU issue Responsibility supplements the Art of Research VII conference organized on 3-4 December 2020 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland. We invite artist–researchers — all participants of the Art of Research VI conference as well as others interested in the issues addressed in the call — to submit theme-related research expositions for the specific issue of RUUKKU.

The issue is edited by Mira Kallio-Tavin, Bilge Aktaş and Maarit Mäkelä.

We ask you to create your proposals for research expositions in the Research Catalogue (RC) at www.researchcatalogue.net. Note! The creation of an exposition requires registration and a complete RC user account (see ‘register'). Please submit your proposals (complete expositions) via RC ('submit to publication', 'submit unlimited publication to', and 'ruukku') no later than 30th September 2021. 15th of November 2021. If you wish for additional information, please contact Maarit Mäkelä at maarit.makela@aalto.fi

Draft submissions can be discussed with the editors before 31st of August. In this case, the exposition should be shared with the editors using the RC link share function. Use the ‘share' menu, keep the exposition private but select the last option (‘When enabled…'), confirm the selection and send the link via e-mail to the address above. If you need assistance, please contact Tero Heikkinen at tero.heikkinen@uniarts.fi

Instructions for submitting and draft submissions, including links to detailed instructions, can be found at http://ruukku-journal.fi/en/instructions

RUUKKU is a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed media rich journal on artistic research launched in 2013. RUUKKU is published and supported by the University of the Arts Helsinki, Aalto School of Arts, Design and Architecture and the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland, with a particular focus on multi-lingual publication. The primary languages of publication are Finnish, Swedish and English.