Festival, performative interventions, interdisciplinary konference and socio-artistic activities
How does the urban society of today build the culture of tomorrow?
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". Three artistic interventions from the European theatre network SECOND CITIES - PERFORMING CITIES (Dries Verhoeven: "Ceci n'est pas …", LIGNA: "Walking the City", Ant Hampton: "A voice - 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 at Kaserne Basel.
The interdisciplinary conference held on June 12-14 was the central and the closing event of the festival. In various panels, keynotes, face-to-face talks and discussions, performaCITY examined the reciprocal relationship of performative, artistic practice and the built-up, vibrant city 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.
Socio-artistic activities accompaigned 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 were workshops for young professionals with invited artists.
Conference and socio-artistic activities are curated by trans4mator (Imanuel Schipper, Johanna Dangel)
This event is organized by Pro Helvetia as part SharedSpace (see below) Switzerland. You can find more information about this project in Related links (above).