(publication à venir - publication to come soon)

>projektgruppe<
Grabenstr. 9/B, D-20357 Hamburg, +49/40/4302067, info@projektgruppe.org

Urban Contact Zone
sharing areas, using places

Hamburg/Germany, 25-29 May 2006
A Northeast Issues Meeting, conceived and organized by >projektgruppe< Hamburg.

I. Thematic outline
“Contact Zones […] refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” (Mary Louise Pratt)

Urban Contact Zone is an exploration of contemporary art’s current interest and proposals concerning urban and public spaces. Timely art projects are concerned with the social meaning of places and other geographically referenced entities. Art also plays an ever more important role in the examination of the media character of cities as well as of latest tendencies in urban development and land use. Recently, in particular those sectors and institutions rely on the expertise of art, whose own traditional field of action is urban renewal. Urban Contact Zone aims at bringing together contributions that have developed their own enquiries in this context. At the three-day Meeting, the specific situation of certain places should take centre stage: hot spots (for various reasons), public spaces, waterside areas, railroad properties, post-industrial sites, disused areas, touristic zones, places of cultural/historic interest, and others. Focussing on these kinds of areas in Budapest, Hamburg, St. Petersburg as well as in other globalized cities allows for comparisons. What do these places say about today’s spatial conditions? How do they influence your surroundings? How do you deal with them as artists, theorists or cultural workers? What kind of questions or problems do you actually meet in the process of working on a certain urban area?
Location-specific works and projects that have emerged from post-industrial and socio-political changes in recent years are asked to come to the fore. They are of note not solely with regard to regional features, for they need to position themselves within a larger framework in which comparative abilities of everyday environs and common social spaces will be primarily meaningful.
The project’s basic concept is rooted in the focal points of contemporary artistic assumptions concerning the city. Urban space is mainly perceived as a social (contact) field; districts, squares, plazas, streets, architecture and institutions are fathomed with regard to their everyday, social relations. Accordingly, the topical focuses of the project may be preliminarily divided as follows:

Urban	Contact	Zone
Key Areas	Public / Common Spaces	Reframing Topography
Media City / Mediated City	Whose City?	Land Use Debate
Highlighted History	Neighbourhoods	Detouring

II. Structure
Urban Contact Zone is conceived as a project to which artists, cultural workers and theorists contribute whose works deal in particular with issues related to certain spaces such as mentioned above. At the international Northeast Issues Meeting in Hamburg, 25 – 29 May 2006, artists and scholars will present and discuss projects, works in progress and current problems connected to the Urban Contact Zone. The presentations may apply a great variety of media and methods. The Meeting will be held at “Deichtorhallen” exhibition hall for contemporary art (www.deichtorhallen.de). Following the event, contributions to the conference will be published in a special edition of the Journal for Northeast Issues.