CALL FOR PROPOSALS INTER-FORMAT SYMPOSIUM ON HOSTING AND DISPLACING: Critical tourism, site-specificity and post- romantic condition Place: NIDA ART COLONY, May 16-19, 2013 Organizers: Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais/Sierre(CH) and Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Art (LT) In a time where heritage, sustainability and ecology increasingly cross the path of tourism, artists working in remote contexts and tourists often share the observation of similar cultural objects: iconic landscape sites, vernacular culture and authentic artifacts, invented traditions and nostalgia. One effect of this condition, as Miwon Kwon highlights in the essay “The Wrong Place”, is that the increasing mobility of the art system, involving both centres and remote situations, has led to romanticizing the image of the cultural worker. The symposium aims at bringing into question correspondences between artistic practices and critical tourism in a trans- disciplinary context. In contemporary artistic practices, do displacements take the form of a romantic expedition or are they based on hospitality and exchange? And what happens in the stay? What kind of connection/network of competence can be developed in a situation of post-romantic retreat? How to avoid and/or critically read the exoticism potential arisen by these sites? How to deal with these two new genres of colonies – artistic and touristic ones – that are both conceptually and physically re-shaping the landscape? Key-words and key-questions: The artist as tourist Artistic and curatorial practices in remote contexts as hospitality Critical tourism and re-mapping culturescapes Museification of landscape and local histories Touristic gaze and the construction of places Sightseeing as artistic research Nostalgia tourism in post-colonial contexts Landscape and contemporary forms of exoticism Identity landscape and site-specific artistic interventions Localism vs. standardized identities Critical artistic actions in alpine and seaside contexts Site-specific materials in Nida (LT) and Sierre (CH) (snow, dam, amber, sand, vernacular culture) Staged authenticity and interpreting tradition Post-romantic experiences of the picturesque Dis-placing artistic practices in rural / alpine artistic colonies and residencies Networked retreat for cultural production