Cantieri in Movimento: Industrial Heritage Soundscape (2nd edition)
1 February 2023 — 1 July 2024
About the Project
Cantieri in Movimento: Industrial Heritage Soundscape (2nd edition) (2023—2024) is a project supporting young European artists (up to 35 years) working with music, performative and visual arts. Selected artists will participate in educational programs, including residency, cultural exchange, and cooperation with their peers from other countries. Project participants will create of a joint work based on local to the industrial, cultural, and historical context of the cultural centers involved. Artists will collaborate on creating the work that will be presented at the final residency in Italy.
The project has the following aims:
- Support young artists under 35 in the process of self-promotion by providing innovative tools supporting their self-entrepreneurship and mobility
- Strengthen and expand the already existing network (first edition) with further exchange actions through strategic working tables among operators
- Deepen the themes developed in the first edition related to the investigation of industrial archaeology sites to specialise young artists under 35 and improve their competitiveness
- Organise workshops and creative residencies in Italy and abroad to provide new skills and get in touch with the European cultural market,
- Disseminate the strategies and practices implemented among external cultural operators to facilitate replicability.
Stages of the Project
The project's first stage began with an initial collective residency so that the artists would immediately enter into a relationship with each other and organise themselves autonomously into small groups to tackle the site-specific creation. The residency took place in Sicily but touched upon different stages: Catania, Palermo, and Syracuse, as the headquarters of the grouping partners and physical locations of industrial archaeology (June—July 2023).
From the first residency until the end of the project, a travel diary was started as a multimedia tool managed by the artists and operators involved, which shares and reports in a personal way (POV) all the phases of the project, constantly consultable online, interactive and informal, to facilitate dissemination and understanding of methodologies and themes (June 2023—July 2024).
Then, the collective research and creation phase will be launched, still focusing on industrial archaeology sites, in which the artists will deepen their knowledge of the spaces subject to site-specific creation with the support of Italian and foreign mentors (September 2023—May 2024). During this phase, further tools will be provided to improve the artists' skills through in-person and online workshops. The workshops will be of a practical nature (use of innovative technologies for sound creations, interviews, and live recordings to write collective dramaturgy, recording or audio-visual processing of repertory or original materials, sound-performance improvisation with percussion instruments and everyday objects, use of spoken language as sound material).
According to the groups of artists who will be formed and the places of investigation they chose, residencies will be organised with a view to the site-specific return of the fruit of the collective work (June—July 2024).
During the same period, one or more artists from each group will be prepared to be project ambassadors. The mentors from the Italian and European cultural centres will organise meetings with other subjects outside the groupings (institutions, universities, schools, cultural centres, networks, etc.) to recount live and through multimedia materials the themes, methodologies, and strategies of the two editions (June—July 2024).
By the end of July, all the artists will return to Sicily for the second final return between Catania, Palermo, and Syracuse. The last months of the project will be dedicated to the systematisation and dissemination of the results to share methods, outcomes, limits, and difficulties, to improve in the following tasks, to strengthen the international network, and to provide the young artists with more effective tools afterward.
The Italian Grouping Consists of:
- Associazione Culturale Zo as leader (former Sulphur refinery-Catania)
- Associazione Culturale Curva Minore (Cantieri della Zisa, former furniture factory-Palermo)
- Associazione Culturale Darshan (musical material experts from the world's folkloric tradition-Catania)
- Associazione Culturale Ortigia Sound System (Production and dissemination of contemporary and electronic music and organisation of multidisciplinary festivals in unconventional venues)
The Partners of the Project
The foreign grouping consists of a group of partners spread over six different countries:
- Zentralwek (Dresden, Germany) — the multidisciplinary centre of performance languages, based in a former industry, first a publishing equipment factory, then an arms factory during the Nazi period, then a printing works for the communist regime (member of the Trans Europe Halles)
- Media Еvent (Budapest, Hungary) — international network with a music focus, specialising in the promotion and circulation of emerging talents, organises the Babel Сamp in a former agricultural industry (member of the Babel Аrts Network)
- Babel Аrt (Belgrade, Serbia) — centre for creating performance languages with a music focus, based in Ciglana, in former warehouses linked to heavy industry (member of the Babel Аrts network)
- Cie Anteprima (Lyon, France) — production company of multidisciplinary events, experts in international touring, and interactive installations (member of the Onda Network)
- Maly Berlin (Trnava, Slovakia) — multidisciplinary performing arts centre based at Nadvorie, a municipal coworking space for advertising agencies, art-design, visual arts, and food and wine (member of Anthena Network and Trans Europe Halles)
- IZOLYATSIA (Soledar, Ukraine) — multidisciplinary creation centre at the salt-mining quarries in the Donesk, now occupied by the Russian army, at the height of the war. Cultural workers and artists associated with the organisation are refugees in other European countries (member of Trans Europe Halles)
Artist Oleksandr Guzeev joined the IZOLYATSIA team. Now, the IZOLYATSIA resident, Anthea Ipsale and Ronja Sommer will work on a project related to industrial heritage —- with colleagues from Zentralwerk (Dresden, Germany, from April 8th to the 14th, 2024).
