Open Call for video material for the project
Morse Code: Distress Call

Submission deadline: 8 June 2014

Morse Code: Distress Call is part of the project Returning to Sender at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, which consists of an exhibition, interventions, workshop and round-table discussions. Returning to Sender urges an examination of the notions of production, dissemination and perpetuation of knowledge by the institution through understanding of its role as Botschaft – which means both “embassy” and “message” in german.

Morse code: Distress Call aims to discover video material – realised works, video statements or works in progress – of international artists and cultural workers, which have been blocked, banned, unnoticed, terminated, unfinished, too locally sensitive, too dangerous or provocative to talk about. We are looking for moving images presenting a response to certain political, economical and social events both from local and international perspectives and which could be considered a distress call.

Morse Code: Distress Call aims to create a space within the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for testing the core idea of cosmopolitanism. This notion is often exploited in cultural contexts as a belief in the existence of “shared morals” or “universal truths” coded in our shared human origin. The project investigates possibilities for perceiving and understanding these “universal human” codes in the cultural production.

Selected materials will be presented in a loop, which will be shown during the three days of the project
Returning to Sender at the HKW on the 16-18th June, 2014.

What we are looking for:
1. existing or specifically produced video works or video materials
2. video should be maximum 5 minutes (no special codec required)
3. the sender must be the author of the submitted works or own the copyright
Requirements for submission:
1. please send a short work description (title, date, place and the name of the author. We
will respect any request for anonymity)
2. a short introduction of the content of the work
3. include a very short description of your personal background
4. to create the effect of on-off tones of morse code, we would like to create a line of video sequences.
Therefore we would like to ask you not to put the title and the credits into the video. All credits of each
singular work will be printed in the project information list.
5. upload the materials to http://www.wetransfer.com and paste the link into the description

Please submit required materials before 8th of June, to:
morse.opencall@gmail.com

Returning to Sender is a project of the postgraduate program Cultures of the Curatorial of Hochschule für
Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Art), Leipzig, in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin.