In the autumn 2012, Pixelache sent out a call for programme planner for the next edition of our festival in Helsinki (16-19.5.2013). Responding in a collaborative fashion to the call on the theme "Facing North - Facing South, the Bricolabs network was the happy selected.

Bricolabs is a fluid network created in 2006 to investigate - from a critical and creative perspective - the loop of free/libre/open content, software and hardware for community applications. Bricolabs promotes open debate and critical making on such themes, between people with diverse backgrounds, in areas of expertise from Latin America, Europe, Asia and North America. Special attention is given to affective networking as a shared value.



Bricolabs wants to bring a multilayer perspective to trans-local networking. It proposes a critical perspective on the usual north/south dichotomy, interested and rooted in deep resonant networks where the vital interaction between and construction of things, ideas, and relationships is ongoing, and borders are seldom taken into account. This is as true for geographic boundaries as it is for disciplinary ones – recently Bricolabs members have turned their attention to anti-disciplinary collaboration as an escape from the common traps of western/northern paradigms of development.

The Bricolabs programme will include live remote sessions with a number of collaborative groups sharing their perspectives from different parts of the world, as well as an exhibition articulating models of open source culture, translocality, DIWO, and subjective infrastructures. Several practical workshops will be conducted along these same lines. The festival will give Bricolabs members a rare face-to-face opportunity to meet and organise working sessions for particular collaborative projects. Bricolabs will also be facilitating discussions and panels, portraying collective efforts that take place across diverse practices engaging the work of artists, developers, thinkers - thus redefining the geophysical and virtual ecologies of their practices, as well as methodologies in the context of open source models and the theme of the festival.