*CFP* "CREATIVE INTERRUPTIONS: A FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND ACTIVISM", BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Creative Interruptions: A Festival of Arts and Activism

BFI - British Film Institute, London Southbank

17 – 18 June 2019

Creative Interruptions: A Festival of Arts and Activism will explore how marginalised communities use the arts, media and creativity to challenge exclusion. The festival hopes to shed light on the local and global dynamics that rupture, alienate, and marginalise communities and the creative tools used to address and tackle disenfranchisement. Bringing together activists, artists, academics and policy-makers, the festival aims to create new networks and facilitate local, national, and global debates surrounding the arts, media, diversity and inequality.

The current uncertainties around immigration, cultural difference, rights and responsibilities have resurfaced global debates on colonialism, borders, race, and resistance and brought to light the creativity that these circumstances produce. With this in mind, the aim of this interdisciplinary festival is to explore why and how particular kinds of creative forms, textures and (alternative) aesthetics are used in arts and activism. What is it about theatre, film, or the digital medium that makes each of them the most appropriate or enabling forms and spaces to communicate, share and enable activist messages, for example around race and class politics? In what circumstances does everyday creativity constitute a creative intervention?

The festival will combine talks with creative presentations and outputs (including VR, films and exhibited material), as well as panel discussions with an opportunity for participants to discuss the relationship between arts, media and inequality. We welcome and encourage contributions across a wide range of related subject areas including the following:

• Grassroots creativity, state structures and disconnection 
• Creative legacies of partition and civil rights 
• Co-creative, decolonial, and participatory methodologies 
• Historical understanding of creative practices by disenfranchised communities 
• How creativity intersects with ideologies and histories of colonialisms and racialisms 
• Class/Race and radical creativity 
• Heritage, autonomy, and cultural memory 
• Collaborative and participatory practices of lived experience 
• Media forms, cultural forms, and spaces (film, audio, theatre, literature or vernacular creativity) used to challenge disenfranchisement 
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion and creative expression 
• Digital, Artificial and Virtual environments for social change 
• The instrumentalisation and neo-liberalisation of the cultural and creative industries

We invite artists, scholars, and creative industries professionals to submit proposals for papers, workshops, and art installations.

Instructions for Proposals

Abstracts for proposed contributions should address one of the conference themes in 250 words and be submitted as a MS Word file along with a short biography (100 words). All submitted material should list your name, institution and/or organisational affiliation (if any).

Instructions for Workshops, Screenings, Exhibitions

We encourage ideas for a variety of contributions, including but not limited to presentations adopting creative methodologies and approaches, such as participatory workshops seminars, exhibitions, films, spoken word or similar. Proposals should address one of the conference themes in 250-500 words and be submitted as a MS Word file.

Please send abstracts and proposals to photini.vrikki@brunel.ac.uk by Thursday 10th January 2019.

Registration

Contributors will not be charged a registration fee.

Full details of how to register will be available in January on our website.

If you would like to be kept informed of when registration is open, please email creativeinterruptions@gmail.com