In 2019, the International Art Exhibition of Venice, directed by Ralph Rugoff, was titled May You Live in Interesting Times. The phrase has an uncertain origin and is likely the result of a misunderstanding that renders it ambiguous, as it may also be interpreted as a wish for living in dark, challenging, and uncertain times. Faced with the complexity of reality, the exhibition invited us to broaden our perspective. The wish came true. If, in the Fifties of the 20th century, the Internationale Situationniste pioneered the use of détournement to rewrite the modes, codes, and boundaries of art, today misappropriation, hijacking, diversion, deviation, and misdirection of meanings and things are actions easily traced in both concrete and virtual reality. In the summer of 2023 in New York, the orange sky and the unbreathable air caused by smoke from the Québec wildfires shifted the perceptual regime, producing a collective estrangement from the everyday environment. In the spring of 2025 in Germany, erroneous road closure reports on Google Maps rendered real space illegible, generating an induced mass drift. So, if the time we inhabit is disorienting even in its smallest details, if inhospitable houses and uncertain lands proliferate, if the surreal is the form of the real, how are we to traverse it?
Détournement thus moves from disorientation, but along a path that does not lead to the domestication of space, nor to returning dwelling to the ‘own’ and the ‘familiar’, thereby exorcising disorientation itself.
In this interesting time, it is the country, the home, the familiar, and the self that await rethinking and redesigning, in order to give substance to the pantopia Michel Serres writes about, to traverse without having to stay, return, or ‘re-familiarise’.
Timeline
Sections: Project, Essay, Journey, Archive, Ring, Tutorial, Translation, Fundamentals
Abstracts must be submitted by March 1, 2026
Abstracts acceptance notification by March 10, 2026
Papers submission by May 20, 2026
Section: Tale
Papers submission by March 1, 2026
Papers acceptance notification by March 10, 2026
Publication of “Vesper” No. 15, November 2026
More information can be found in the full call for papers here
(https://www.iuav.it/en/node/956)