Active City(ZENS)
1 January 2023 — 31 December 2024
IZOLYATSIA, together with three partners working with challenging urban localities in Prague, Berlin and Skopje, will design innovative audience development activities, attracting to urban stage performances and interventions.
The Active City(ZENS) project gathers four partnered organisations to convey various performative interventions to the public space. The aim is to develop prototypes of situations in varied time spans and initiate thoughts and conversations about the position of culture in everyday life, in unexpected locations with a potential to approach new audiences. The partners created a system of 10 days, 10 minutes, 10 seconds. The individual interventions are better explained under each institution.
The Arts and Theatre Institute, Czech Republic, is using the 10-day model within the duration of the 15th edition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, while interconnecting interventions in the public space by creative teams from 30 universities, providing exposure for both the young designers and the festival, with each intervention including a QR link leading to the PQ website and introducing each project.
The 10-minute format was used by the Association For Art And Science, Faculty Of Things That Can’t Be Learned, North Macedonia. Their performative situations are focused on the preservation of brutalist architectural gem Domce, by placing “simple periodically changing banners and signs on its facade, attracting the attention of the surrounding community including everyday passersby, using time to develop expectations and produce an hour-long live event putting both community and the building into central focus.”
The KUNSTrePUBLIK / ZK/U, Germany, uses the swift 10-second format of performance bites: Focusing the attention on the roof of a building to create extra short performance installations accessible to a large number of daily train commuters as well as pedestrians, park visitors or members of the community surrounding the building. Reaching out to new audiences, the performances aim to “create a simple cultural intervention into everyday commute.”
The fourth partner, the Ukrainian platform Izolyatsia, will work alongside other partners in their locations to learn from environments outside of the mainstream and exchange knowledge and skills that could eventually lead to the development of a long-term plan for cultural programming, suitable for future restart and cultural restoration of locations seized or affected by the Russian aggression.
Active City(ZENS) is a project co-funded by Creative Europe Programme the European Union.
Banner image: 2/ Rusalka, by students of the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London