A few notes about The Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival as a possible non-exhibition model (original) (raw)

The Institutional Practices of a Festival

Taking as my starting point the assumption that art is a social practice, and how it is made and perceived is always determined by the socio-political and economic context, I would like to propose that a festival be regarded as an art institution – and consider the implications of that perspective. The political ontology of the festival; the political and economic entanglements of curatorial practices; economic (self-)censorship and its recent manifestations at theatre festivals in Poland will be the main facets of my study. I will also enquire about how the festival today can be ‘taken over’, regained a space for critical activity. My consideration of the institutional practices of present-day festivals will be based on my own experiences as a curator; they will also be situated in the context of practicable institutional-critical activity as proposed by Gerald Raunig, and take as their point of reference the concept of an institution as a common good. The concept of the ‘performativeness of the art world’ formulated by Ana Vujanovic will be of primary importance to my study.

Porous Bodies – A dialogue on festival curating

Into the City, Onto the Stage: Unlikely Collaborations in the Performing Arts, 2020

Curators Satu Herrala and Eva Neklyaeva share their practices on festival curating as well as their thinking about embodiment and a collective body in the context of Santarcangelo Festival and Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival.

Festivals, spatiality and the new Europe

Ethnologia europaea, 2002

The principal purpose of the A. is to pay attention to events that emphasize and give profile to local, everyday life. He also focuses on the multiplicity of Europe and the politics of distinction through local markets, national commemoration days and open-air museums. Cultural heritage is presented as an ongoing process of production and re-production of meaning in these events. The A. raises questions about how one can conduct fieldwork on matters as elusive as the presence of Europe, and the sensory experiences of taking part in ceremonial activities.

Events and Placemaking: Special issue of the International Journal of Event and Festival Management

Events and festivals have become increasingly important policy tools for cities and regions. They are able to produce a wide range of externalities, including economic impacts, image change, social capital and cultural regeneration. All of these event-related externalities have impacts and effects on the places in which they are staged. In many cases, these event-related impacts are analysed separately, but in fact the most powerful effects of events are more holistic, able to impact not just on individual economic sectors or social groups, but on places as a whole. Over time, the use of events by cities and regions has grown more sophisticated and complex. The range of policy goals for which events are utilised has expanded, and the range and type of events staged has increased as well. Increasingly, public administrations seek to coordinate the events in their jurisdiction to create synergies between events and to maximise the benefits generated. Event policies make frequent references to the development of programmes or " portfolios " of events (Antchak, 2016). The ability of events to effect a broad range of changes in different places has added to their attractiveness as a placemaking tool, and has led to more cities developing " events units " and other forms of event-based placemaking.

Arts Festivals: Property, Heritage or More

One of the interesting things about arts festivals is that many of the activities that occur as part and parcel of them can be mapped onto existing categories of copyright works. Indeed, so powerful is the rhetoric of these categories that there is a question about the extent to which they have constituted the very idea of “arts” in this context – so that festivals typically identify themselves as film festivals, musical festivals, theatre festivals and so on, even if in fact empirical research reveals that almost no festivals confine themselves to only one form of “artistic” output. It would, therefore, be tempting (and much easier) to treat festivals as being just like any other form of distribution of copyright protected works. However, limiting our understanding of festivals to being merely another means of distribution is really limiting our understanding of the nature of arts festivals and their social, political and economic significance. While it is undoubtedly true that arts festivals, particularly some arts festivals, produce economic value for the entertainment industries, they also encompass a range of other values that are less easily measured but nevertheless present. In this chapter, it is argued that arts festivals should be recognized as a form of cultural heritage. If this case can be made out, then it presents us with a problem. This is that the public and communal values of arts festivals as forms of cultural heritage appear to be in potential conflict with the intellectual property rights that appear to also be a feature of the arts festival environment.

Future trajectories of festival research

Tourist Studies

In their editorial for the first issue of Tourist Studies, Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang made us aware that tourism research had shifted to an exploration of the extraordinary everyday where ‘more or less everyone now lives in a world rendered or reconfigured as interesting, entertaining and attractive – for tourists’. From our standpoint 20 years later, we suggest this particular departure point has important insights to offer our understanding of a quintessential tourism event, that of the festival, which now intervenes in daily life in all manner of ways. In this commentary, we present a reflective commentary on recent scholarship that advocates for more rigour in festival studies, with greater theory development and testing within the festival context, and how this work is suggestive of future directions for festival research. We present several areas that are ripe for further research, particularly given the tumultuous nature of the world we are living in, such as the challeng...

Festivalisation of cultural production

The growth in arts festivals that has taken place since the 1990s has changed the structure of the cultural market place. Based on interviews and discussions with festival directors and arts producers, participant observation as a producer and audience member, primarily in the UK, together with examples from the literature, this paper explores the question of whether festival aesthetics and the particularities of festival production and exhibition are changing the nature of the work that is being produced in response to festivalisation. It identifies a number of dimensions of the festival experience, commissioning, spectacularisation, thematic programming, immersion and participation, that are increasingly prevalent in the performing and visual arts being produced for non-festival settings. This festivalisation of culture poses new challenges and offers different opportunities to artists, producers and audiences to make innovative kinds of work that wouldn't have been possible within the hitherto standard production models.