creart: artist in residence in oulu 2024 (finland)

The General Cultural Services of the City of Oulu opens a residency call for artists of the CreArt network as part of the program production of the Lumo Light Festival and the Urban Neighbourhood Culture of Cultural Centre Valve.

As an Arctic European city, Oulu has a special relationship with light and darkness. Lumo Light Festival celebrates light and visual arts during the darkest time of the year in Northern Finland as a city-wide open event. Located and organized by the City of Oulu, Lumo is the largest festival in Oulu area and a solid audience-favorite with over 100.000 annual visitors on the festival weekend.

A special theme at Lumo Light Festival 2024 is interaction. We encourage artists to contemplate how to promote and encourage open and respectful dialogue between different points of view and showcase this in their installation proposals. Lumo Light Festival is an integral part of Oulu’s upcoming European Capital of Culture year Oulu2026 and the city’s work in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for Media Arts.

As the installations of the Lumo Light Festival are traditionally concentrated in the Oulu city centre, the CreArt residency wants to take visual art to new, surprising locations on the borders of Oulu and create art pieces in our peri-urban and rural communities with the CreArt AiR Program 2024.

The Urban Neighbourhood Culture facilities of Cultural Centre Valve produce and develop neighborhood culture and opportunities for cultural activities in different districts of Oulu. The aim of the district activities is to support and promote the regions' own cultural activities. It creates opportunities for art and culture and brings cultural services and events within everyone's reach. With the light and media art works implemented in Oulu's neighborhoods during Lumo, Valve's Neighborhood Culture facilities aim to promote these goals in the more diverse neighborhoods of the northern city.

The open portfolio call is aimed at artists in the visual field of the CreArt network who work in the fields of light and media art. Urban neighbourhood works of Lumo can be light and media art, community and environmental art, installations or surprising visual art interventions in a city where November is the darkest time of the year.