The N2: Living Chatter conference takes place at Arcada on Friday, 25 September. Throughout the day, a series of talks and presentations will occur, featuring contributors to the festival and other related narratives to the festival theme, 'living spaces'. The exact lineup is still being confirmed but we will add more information here as the programme solidifies.

Featured speakers:

Jonas Büchel (Riga) - Co-founder and CEO of the Urban Institute in Riga, Jonas is a freelancing social worker and cultural manager as well as a practicing urbanist, urban curator
and community worker.  In his field of activity, he tries to observe and understand human challenges in collectivity and society's space in urbanity. He aims to tackle the current society challenges by planning and managing projects with communities, municipalities and regional/state institutions. At N2: Living Chatter, Jonas will present some of the grassroots culture activities in Riga that have challenged the traditional strictures of Latvian urban life, particularly the activities of the Free Riga movement. 

Owen Kelly (Helsinki) - We can find increasing evidence pointing to the facts that people live their lives as narrative, and that people consist of nothing more than the narratives from which they compose their lives. These narratives draw from three sorts of memes: those that already exist when we emerge from the womb; those that others tell us about ourselves and the world; and those we generate ourselves and tell ourselves and others. We can find indicators of all this in the work of artists, neuro-scientists, philosophers, psychologists, sports coaches and theologians. Owen will give a short lecture on what this might mean for arts activists, and why arts activists might need to develop toolkits to help people learn to consciously co-author themselves. He will then demonstrate one such tool that uses a framework drawn from Transactional Analysis to create a method of generating crowd-sourced archetypes.