From the streets of Basel, Warsaw and Utrecht, the beaches of Latvia and stadiums in the UK to a piazza in Italy, a lighthouse in Norway, a fortress island in Finland, yards in Veles, Macedonia, and a visual theatre school in Jerusalem: over the past year and a half SharedSpace workshops, gatherings, and retreats have explored scenography as an expanded field. Artists, students and theorists investigated theatre as a place where social interactions are made, and explored how it is influenced by various aspects of design: reading and writing space (the Netherlands), designing taste (Norway), the spatial positioning of the audience (Prague), the weather of the performance (Warsaw).

SharedSpace was joined by over than 65 000 of professionals, students and audience members from all over the world in 20 public events, including gatherings workshops, symposia, festivals, exhibitions and 10 other events such as retreats and artistic residencies in 11 European countries.

SharedSpace began in spring 2013. Today, in January 2015, we are halfway through and are preparing for the peak event of the project: the 2015 Prague Quadrennial. Over 65 countries, from Germany and Brazil to Kazakhstan and Antarctica, are building scenography expositions in concert with SharedSpace: Music Weather Politics. Combining the SharedSpace themes, the curators and designers are looking to express the local theatrical culture, its qualities and issues, while exploring scenography as a “relational" shared space. At stake is the place of the individual within today's world or within the community (as citizens – Uruguay), the role of the designer in the process (including his changing responsibilities in the process of making theatre performance – Lithuania), the “place of the designer within the national and international context" (Mexico), and an exploration of the relationship between present and the future (Spain).

Especially for SharedSpace, the Victoria and Albert Museum is organizing an exhibition about the renowned Glastonbury Festival, an environmental shared space built by designers and audiences in the UK. Prague will further be visited by more than 80 Tribes – masked groups of professionals and students from 35 countries – and another 1,500 students who will be taking part in workshops and performances as part of SharedSpace's educational SpaceLab project.

photo: Anna Ktičková