2017
Piattaforma di confronto tra operatori internazionali su pratiche culturali e visioni artistiche di rigenerazione urbana.
THE CONTEXT AS A CHANGING ACTOR
Our starting point is the definition of “context”, as follows:
the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect; moreover it points out the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.
Etymology: contex(ere), con + texere, to pleat (or plait), or weave + -tus suffix
“Context” could also mean the cultural background, the milieu, the specific culture of a place and of a time, the climate.
Our aim is to start a discussion, to build a collective thinking and work on finding ways to cooperate outside of top-down working structures.
Which is the role of the cultural workers in their social context?
How to reassess our own professional strategies and new business models?
How to overturn our point of view from what we have to offer to what is necessary?
How to build platforms for mutual exchange of time, products, creativity, craftsmanship but also other types of skill sharing?
How do we use our potential and our resources?
Which are the potential cultural spaces that could be regenerated in your territory? Is the cultural factory also a concept, without a physical space?
As citizens, beside your being cultural workers, which is the need and the potential your context is asking for and is showing to you?
Which was the situation you found in your context and how you made your choice, which place you chose? Did the place chose you instead?
How did you stimulate and experiment the participation of the citizens to your performing arts projects?
How do you engage yourself as cultural workers into such projects? – What does the word ‘collective’ means to you?
Focusing on our local context, what does the society need? – Does the society need artists?
PANELISTS
Guido Acampa (IT/Napoli) Aperture
Guido Acampa is a videomaker. He is co-founder of Riot Studio, where he curates the program, and also takes care of Riot Cinema Lab, atelier of research on experimental video productions. Riot Studio is a place dedicated to arts and new ideas, seeking connections among the urban and social fabric and the International context.
“Aperture” is an event which encourages contemporary artists to reinterpret the relation between the city and its historical sites. Thanks to contemporary art, the opening of a space combines with the “ Aperture” of new visions about the future of Naples.
Bush Hartshorn (UK) Dance Base
Bush is a mentor, director and curator.
Throughout the nineties he was artistic director of the Green Room Manchester, UK, lately he has been artistic director of Dansehallerne in Copenhagen Denmark. Throughout the last thirty years he has formed and contributed to a number of international networks, Hartshorn undertakes many short projects particularly focused on mentoring dance artists, and he is currently Head of Catalyst Dance Management, a project developed at Dance Base as a unique resource for the professional dance community in Scotland, contributing vital skills to smaller companies and established artists who cannot afford full-time administrators, producers or company managers.
Nataša Zavolovšek (SI) Exodos
Natasa Zavolovsek is the director of Exodos, in Ljubljana.
She started her long work in the culture field as a coordinator for Metelkova Network in 1990-94, creating a modern cultural center on the premises of a large military complex. She established Maska production 1999-2001, she was a freelance producer 1997-1999, later she became artistic director of Exodos Festival, and she also founded Kooperativa, Ngo coalition with the aim to create a long-term and sustainable framework for collaboration and development of independent cultural organizations on the Balkan region.
Exodos Festival is involved into several international projects, among others Corners, Theatroskop, Shared space.
cornersofeurope.org
exodosljubljana.si
Federica Rocchi (IT/Modena) Periferico
Project manager and theatre curator. She has a strong experience in the fields of urban regeneration and temporary re-uses. She has been working with Laminarie theatre company in Bologna from 2002 to 2016 as project manager and co-director of theatre DOM la cupola del Pilastro, situated in the suburb area of Pilastro (UBU prize for local development in 2012). She founded Amigdala in 2005. She is director of Periferico Festival since 2008, which takes place every year in a different location; a site-specific art project which encourages the re-interpretation of those spaces and their particular features.
Teja Reba (SI) City of Woman
Teja Reba è un’artista indipendente, autrice e performer.
Attualmente lavora come direttrice della programmazione del progetto City of Women- Associazione di Promozione delle Donne nella Cultura e cura l’edizione annuale dell’omonimo Festival Internazionale di Arti Contemporanee, a Ljubljana.
City of Women è un festival incentrato su un contesto urbano, a vocazione progressista, con una particolare attenzione per le tematiche LGBTIQ e l’inclusione delle minoranze, ispirato dal desiderio di favorire un cambio sociale positivo non solo attraverso “cosa” viene proposto durante la programmazione/produzione, ma anche sul “come” questo processo si può fare portatore di nuove funzioni e connessioni.
Oltre al programma artistico, City of Women organizza una serie di eventi, tra i quali laboratori pratici e teoretici, nei quali invita pensatori che possano ispirare e promuovere scambi e incontri in ambito internazionale.
Teja Reba is an independent artist and performance maker. She currently works as program director of City of Women- Association for Promotion of Women in Culture and as curator of its annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts, in Ljubljana.
The City of Women festival is an urban, progressive, gender and LGBTIQ issues attentive and minorities inclusive context, inspired by the desire to make positive social changes not only by “what” it proposes/produces but also by “how” it functions/connects.
Along side its artistic program, the City of Women Festival also runs a series of discursive events presenting inspiring thinkers and proposing practical/ theoretical workshops in order to stimulate transnational encounters and exchange.
Amar Benbia (FR) La Foule d’Eau
Amar has an heterogeneous learning background: Law studies at Bordeaux IV, history of art at Ecole du Louvre, audiovisual in AFPA of Issoudun.
After a multi-year adventure in the private sector, as manager, trainer, consultant, he synthesized such diversified experience into a life project: La Foule d’Eau, an itinerant factory of participative art he founded and run since 2014, with the aim of building bridges between artists and young people and tackle political issues.
His new project is La Plage d’Esbly, where, together with Le Collectif de la Plage, an informal group of associations engaged on education, architects, theater companies, who want to recuperate a part of Esbly, next to Paris.
Tomàs Aragay (ES) Mapa
Tomàs Aragay and Sofía Asencio are co-directors of Societat Doctor Alonso.
Societat Doctor Alonso set up their base in a rural area, the village of Pontós in the province of Girona, to move away from the ‘noise’ and the ‘uniformity’ that surrounds contemporary creation and the arts in a big city like Barcelona. This allowed them to turn their gaze inward in search of their own voice. Societat Doctor Alonso collaborates with a broad selection of interdisciplinary artists, often continuing these collaborations across an extensive range of projects. They creates the festival Mapa, a site-specific contemporary festival meant to bring radical creative performances to rural areas. Moreover Mapa aimed to facilitate the match
and meeting of artists and citizens, the dramaturgy of the festival was principally based on the concept of popular ancient rituals.
It has been running from 2004 to 2011 in Sant Mori and Pontos, Catalunya, Spain.
Tomàs Aragay and Sofía Asencio are co-directors of Societat Doctor Alonso.
Societat Doctor Alonso set up their base in a rural area, the village of Pontós in the province of Girona, to move away from the ‘noise’ and the ‘uniformity’ that surrounds contemporary creation and the arts in a big city like Barcelona. This allowed them to turn their gaze inward in search of their own voice. Societat Doctor Alonso collaborates with a broad selection of interdisciplinary artists, often continuing these collaborations across an extensive range of projects. They creates the festival Mapa, a site-specific contemporary festival meant to bring radical creative performances to rural areas. Moreover Mapa aimed to facilitate the match
and meeting of artists and citizens, the dramaturgy of the festival was principally based on the concept of popular ancient rituals.
It has been running from 2004 to 2011 in Sant Mori and Pontos, Catalunya, Spain.
doctoralonso.org
FB Mapa.pontos
tea-tron.com
Javier Cuevas (ES) Spanish Matchbox
Javier Cuevas, dramaturgist, performer, curator and context-generator for contemporary performing arts. Artistic director of the Live Arts Lab – Theatre Leal of La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands). He has presented his work in Spain, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Argelia and Norway. He creates, together with mediaturgist Sara Serrano, the project “Spanish Matchbox”.
Spanish Matchbox was born from a platform project by Creación Contemporánea Española, in the E&G Teater Festival (Stamsund, Norway), after several international activities. Now we are going a step beyond, changing our shape from festival to a cellar production system, able to be set in different contexts and festivals, sharing our same aims, increasing the possible relationships with the involved projects.
Pippo Pirozzi (IT/Napoli)
Borgo dei Vergini luoghidicultura
The project is the result of a synergy amongst a group of citizens and associations, all engaged in enhancing the cultural area’s heritage. It aims to facilitate and support the re-development of this precious area of Naples through the research, planning, promotion and fruition of “places of culture”.
Chiara Faini (IT/Milano) Smart
SMart is a network of more than 90.000 artists and freelance that stretches throughout 9 European countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Germany and Austria.
SMart’s main mission is to improve the working conditions of creative professionals by offering them tools and services designed to support their projects and guarantee their professional revenues.
Moderator : Anna Estdahl with the team of Altofest Anna Estdahl (Pisa/Italy)
TeatrInGestAzione/Altofest
Anna Estdahl is a freelance producer, collaborating with dance and theatre companies in Italy and abroad. She recently founded her own organization, “Ferradura”, meant to be a management agency but also a laboratory for new projects and visions concerning the contemporary performing arts in Italy, working in a local scene, in Pisa, with a special attention towards the International. In march 2017 she met TeatrInGestAzione / Gesualdi Trono, it was “love at the first sight” and she is now totally involved into Altofest and the other projects of the company.
Anna Estdahl è una producer freelance, e collabora con compagnie di teatro e danza, in Italia e all’estero. Recentemente ha fondato la propria organizzazione, “Ferradura”, che vuole essere non solo un’agenzia di management degli artisti ma anche un laboratorio di nuovi progetti e visioni sulle performing arts contemporanee in Italia, agendo in un contesto locale, a Pisa, ma con un’attenzione speciale verso l’ambito internazionale. Nel marzo 2017 ha incontrato TeatrInGestAzione / Gesualdi Trono, ed è stato “amore a prima vista”. Da allora è totalmente coinvolta nel progetto Altofest e in tutti i progetti della compagnia.
teatringestazione.com | altofest.net