Time For Live Art is a collaborative project gathering Studio Thor / Trouble Festival (BE), Maska / Performance Festival (SI), New Performance Turku Biennale (FI) and MIR Festival (GR), supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
‘Time For Live Art’ sees four human-sized live art festivals join forces to underline the resilience of the live art sector, in a contemporary world suffering from ecological and health wounds. These festivals believe that gathering around a live event has never been so precious and necessary, though our current conditions urge us to do it in a different way. With this in mind, the partners address and answer to questions of ‘time’ in the creation, presentation and circulation of live artworks: time given to relate the creation to a context, time to experience the artwork, time for mediation around the presentation, time taken for the travel of the artist and time to develop the memory of the audience.
Time To Reflect retreat
The project started in February with the “Time To Reflect” retreat which took place in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Višnjan and Rovinj (Croatia). An intense moment for a group of 12 people including the curators of the 4 festivals, and the artists who will be traveling through Europe during the project: Theano Metaxa from Greece, Gaëtan Rusquet from Belgium, Mark Požlep from Slovenia, and Dash Che from Finland. The retreat was enriched by the presence of author and activist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix and writer and researcher Daphne Dragona who gave lectures and reflections on the discussion related to the topic of time and degrowth. It was also the occasion to meet with the team of Maska Institute, and to encounter local figures like astronomer Korado Korlević and artist-winemaker Tomislav Brajnović. Time to Reflect retreat gave the project a collective experience offering the group a common soil from which each one will develop differently.
Slow travel
The project What Time Is It? which follows 4 artists traveling slowly from one city to another, where the experience of the trip will become the material for a new artistic production, will be launched with Theano Metaxa’s travel and performance “Deadlines”.
Theano Metaxa’s travel from Athens to Brussels will take place between April 8th and 17th, through the Mediterranean, Italy, and France. Theano will be traveling with another person who has passed away before Modernity. She plans to travel into the past while her partner travels into the Future. Undertaking a slow journey through time unfolds artists’ exploration of the issues of social acceleration, Europe and Modernity. Theano and her companion make a skeleton of their journey, proposing to each other possible visits and meetings with philosophers, artists, psychologists, train station clocks, monuments, traces of migration, museums of Natural Science, cemeteries, old surviving buildings, and as many Euro-workers as possible. After their arrival, Theano and her travel partner will lead a workshop with Brussels Europeans which will nourish the performance Deadlines presented at the Trouble Festival on the 21st of April.
TFLA events:
Trouble, 17.-23.4.2023 in Brussels, Belgium
New Performance Turku Biennale 5.-10.9.2023 in Turku, Finland
MIRfestival 24.-30.11.2023 in Athens, Greece
After the four festivals, the next step looks at the future: it associates a platform for younger European performers, and a professional gathering to open sustainable perspectives. A final publication brings together the memories of the different steps.
