Open Call

minus20degree Art & Architecture Winter Biennale 

MELT

Jan 28 – 30, 2016

Deadline for proposals: 20 July 2015

The intention of minus20degree Art & Architecture Winter Biennale is to design or stage the available space with simple interventions, making it accessible to a diverse audience. Proposed as a large-scale laboratory, m20d seeks to utilise the winter landscape as a testing field with snow as its plasticine resource for all expressions of art and architecture.

Signified by the transience of snow, melt can be viewed as synthesis or amalgamation, bringing forth new forms vis-à-vis a process of alchemy. Flachau, as a former mining town with two blast furnaces, and the broader view of Austria as a tourism and steel-producing nation bring additional local context to encourage interpretation.

Melt may also be observed through a global lens, where age-old forces of melting are constantly brought to bare via recurring streams of migration and a long standing history of shifting and merging cultures; a process that on occasion also cultivates the enemies of any such melting. Melt provides further reference in connection to ever-warming alpine winters and the parallel threat of snow as a potentially diminishing resource.

Contributions should seriously and critically address melt, however, optimistic and humorous submissions are equally welcome. Performative interpretations are especially encouraged. m20d16 spans over three days in late January 2016 during which a multitude of disciplines are to become entangled within the landscape as well as each other.

Download the open call brief here.