Workshop
performaCITY
How does today’s urban society shape tomorrow’s culture?
artistic interventions & interdisciplinary conference & socio-artistic activities
performaCITY is a festival taking place from June 6 to June 15 2014 at the Kaserne Basel and in the urban space of Basel. It is based on three elements: artistic/performative interventions in public space, communication in the form of performative walks and socio-artistic activities, as well as an academic conference.
Three artistic interventions from the European theatre network SECOND CITIES – PERFORMING CITIES (Dries Verhoeven: «Ceci n‘est pas …», LIGNA: «Walking the City», Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells: «Lest we see where we are») will be performed in the urban space, and the production «Saving the World» by the German-British performance group Gob Squad will be presented in the Kaserne.
performaCITY is a project designed to bring international researchers, artists, art professionals and students together and connect them with a local theater audience. The festival is understood both as an arbiter as well as a generator of knowledge, but also as a platform for building and fostering an international and interdisciplinary network centered on the issue of «City and Art».
The interdisciplinary conference to be held on 12–14 June will be the central and the closing event of the festival: In various panels, keynotes, face-to-face talks and discussions, performaCITY will examine the reciprocal relationship of performative, artistic practice and the built-up, vibrant city, particularly in regard to the production of a future urban culture. We understand the city as a major producer of a future society’s collective, cultural memory, and the performative practice as an important catalyst for this process.
How does the way we experience and build a city shape the cultural and collective memory of a future society? Which role do the performative arts play in the development of an urban mode of life? Which choreographies of daily life does the city produce?
How can staged bodies make new relationships visible? Which architectures for which body? Can only performances as contemporary rites/ritual generate physical knowledge about urban life? How may a performative memory of the urban be documented?Where is performative culture situated between forgetting/remembering versus projecting/conceptualizing? Can we create collective memory by artistic means? How can collective narratives help imagining a possible future? How can a city be described as an archive room? Which knowledge systems may be uncovered if we understand cities as storage mediums? How can the city as a storage medium be used as a chamber for the visionary – and feed in sustainable knowledge/practice? How can performative practice help?
Socio-artistic activities will accompaign performaCITY with a series of workshops that engages the residents of Basel in the making of an alternative city archive that experiments with ways to trace, document and (re)present the lived experiences of the present in order to build visions and ideas of shared futures. An audio-walk collects and archives memories of city users to specific places in the city and invites to experience these from a different perspective. Additionaly there will be workshops for young professionals with intvited artists.
Host/Partners/Sponsors
Host and geographic focus of the festival is Kaserne Basel.
performaCITY brings together a range of local, national and international institutions from different fields to use the accumulated knowledge and skills and apply this to a broad network.
A European partner is the network Performing Cities, a production network of «second cities» and their performance production centres in Germany (Dresden, Mülheim/Ruhr), France (Poitiers, Strasbourg), the Netherlands (Utrecht) and Poland (Krakow). The network will present three productions – Dries Verhoeven: «Ceci n‘est pas un …», Ligna: «Walking the City», Ant Hampton: «A voice – Lest we see where we are», from 6 up to 15 June in Basel’s urban space. performaCITY will also be the concluding part of the network’s programme.
Conference partners include the University of Basel’s «eikones – NCCR Iconic Criticism» and the Centre of Competence «Kunst und Öffentlichkeit» [Art and Public] at the University of Lucerne.
The festival performaCITY is part of the European project «Shared Spaces», of which Pro Helvetia is a co-initiator. «Shared Spaces» will present a range of projects and programmes in European cities as part of the preliminary programme for the Prague Quadrennial 2015. «Shared Space Switzerland» is organised by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in collaboration with the Festival Antigel Geneva, trans4mator and Haus der Kunst, Uri.
performaCITY is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF.