Gathering Veles: Memory and Space Symposium

SharedSpace Gathering Veles: Memory and Space Symposium
Veles, Macedonia, September 18, 2014

What does the performance space remember? What remains engraved in the DNA of performative space, whether it's an amphitheatre, truss stage, black box, found space or site specific? Under the title Memory and Space, SharedSpace symposium was held as an opening of International Performing Arts festival - IMPACT on September 18, 2014 in Veles, Macedonia.

The aim of the symposium was to examine both theoretical approaches to space memory and its social perception and also practical examples of "layering memories" particularly within a performance space; to examine space as an extended length/depth of both our memory/perception and of our bodies. Starting from the question of what do we actually see when we observe a space, symposium follows the process of constructing a perception, a social/performative reality.

The general framework followed the process of development and perseverance of socially constructed understandings of the world. The symposium was an attempt to analyze the experience of creating a model of the social world, with the Memory as the most essential system through which humans construct perception of reality.

The keynote speaker was Professor of Performance Studies Mike Pearson from Aberystwyth University. Symposium joined other professionals such as set designer Dragan Stojcevski, director of School of Visual Theatre Jerusalem Guy Gutman and artistic director of Santarcangelo festival dei Teatri Silvia Bottiroli.

List of speakers and presentations:

Mike Pearson: On sight, on site: making performance in a small nation

Silvia Bottiroli: Festival and the city: event, memory, potential

Guy Gutman: A conflict of time

Kathleen Irwin: @t@ble: Virtual Dinners / Moveable Feasts (video presentation)

Dragan Stojevski: Interactivity bewtwen art and memory of place

Petar Miloshevski:

Katarzyna Raduszynska: Memory in performing arts (skype presentation)

IMPACT

IMPACT - International Performing Arts Festival is annualy held in Veles, Macedonia.

A festival prepared to take risks, challenge preconceived boundaries and test extremes, a festival trying to unearth artistic gems that are not known to wider space. A festival standing as a platform and offering support to what it believes is of greater meaning than mere entertainment. A festival as an involving surface for radically challenging ideas, concepts and approaches.