localize 2024 – call for ideas & artists

Localize is seeking site-specific artistic works, inter- and anti-disciplinary, as well as cross-genre formats that deal with the art of overcoming obstacles and creating utopias, as well as confronting conventional practices and fomenting new ideas.

We invite artists and cultural practitioners to join us on a excursion into the blue and apply until March 20th with their positions for a temporary, experimental and site-specific exhibition on the theme of trip. Whether dance, light, video, walk, performance, workshop or expansive installation, all formats that open up diverse perspectives on location and theme are welcome.

Built between the world wars in 1925 as part of the former airship harbor, the Regattahaus has a chequered past. After the pipe dream of Zeppelin had long been shattered, the architect Reinhold Mohr designed an expressionist restaurant at the regatta course. In the GDR, it was used by the Potsdam Army Sports Club of the “Nationale Volksarmee” and has stood empty since the German reunification. Now the heritage-listed ensemble of the three-storey wooden construction with pagoda-like roofs and the glass music pavilion floating on the shore is being brought back to life for a weekend.

Localize invites to approach the history of the site via the social significance and dualism encompassed in the concept of the trip in artistic positions. Excursions promise leisure, adventure and an escape from urban life, but also raise questions about privilege, commercialization and power. The Regattahaus symbolises this ambivalence – it is a place of leisure and recreation, but also a stage for military and ideological appropriation and the pursuit of performance in sport.

Sunday outings and local recreation are small escapes from everyday life. Romanticised dropout fantasies #vanlife meets Caspar David Friedrich boom. Is globetrotting necessary self-care in a work-life balance or a distraction from global crisis mode? Under the Regattahaus pagoda-roof and on the water in the music pavilion, in the summer hall and on the terrace, between trees and wooden facades, glass and steel, emerge spaces of confrontation and synergy.

Since 2008, LOCALIZE has been opening up urban spaces for contemporary art in Potsdam. With a thematic, site-specific focus, the festival seeks to explore urban space in transition, interstitial spaces for design and the potential for participation.