Date: From 7 to 19 September
Workshop: From 7 to 16 september
10 Septembre, 18:00. Mårten Spångberg and Valeria Graziano Homenaje a Houdini...y a menudo falta.....
15 Septembre, 18:00. Mårten Spångberg and Tor Lindstrand. International Festival-Disco Capital/Reversed Revolution.
16 Septembre, 18:00. José Pérez de Lama. WikiPlaza y otros proyectos de espacios públicos digitales de
hackitectura.net
17 Septembre, 18:00. Ewen Chardronnet. Escapismo y urbanismo unitario
Performance
18 Septembre, 18:00. Loreto Martínez Troncoso. Finalmente, ¿con o sin título?
Inscription: 31 august. Send your personal dates with you CV to arteleku@gipuzkoa.net
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Mugatxoan is an artistic project created by Entrecuerpos-Mugatxoan Cultural Association, active since 1998. Mugatxoan, in Basque, means “On the border”. This definition confirms our will to place the project in a conceptual territory that has no intention of turning itself into a closed space, enabling us to welcome the changes in creative attitudes, to invent other resources or to offer unpredictable narratives.
Mugatxoan is constructed using the idea of intermediate space as a place for the circulation of codes, redefined by the continuous comings and goings that it is subject to.
It is conceived a kind of transit, as a process of going from one space to another and as the place and the time where this passage occurs; for this reason, it reaches its full significance when it travels around the three cities which host the project.
From its outset, Arteleku (Donostia-San Sebastián) has supported the project and has been the producer and the place where Mugatxoan has developed. The need for creating relationships which enable vindicating cultural projects to be developed in unique places for experimentation gave rise to the collaboration with the Fundaçao de Serralves (Porto) in 2001. In 2008 the fourth associate co-producer, Laboral de Gijón, was incorporated.
A fundamental part of the development of Mugatxoan is directly related to the young artists who take part in the workshops, who have guided us with their needs to structurally modify the project. This gave rise, in 2001, to a pause for transformation, a situation for reflection and structural change and the first co-productions,
In 2007 we called on several of the produced artists to reflect on what Mugatxoan had been to them and what it could be in the future and we made a detailed examination of the aspects special to the project, those that
defined it, those that were necessary and those that could be eliminated. From these meetings came a working group which has accompanied us since the 2008 edition, called Miaketak (Explorers). At present, we are carrying out archive work, compiling images and interviewing the artists who, since 1999, have been part of our journey and which will be included on the new website and in the documentary MUGATXOAN HAMAR.
Mugatxoan 2009 offers a programme of several weeks in each of the cities where it is held, with different examples of contemporary arts (performance, visual arts, dance, drama) setting aside room for research, reflection and the production of new works.
In La Laboral, coinciding for the first time, twelve works by the artists that we have produced between 2001 and 2008 will be presented. These young artists were selected via the different international invitations made during the latest editions, taking part in the workshops and developing their individual projects. We have accompanied these projects, giving them the time and space to go ahead with their process and presentation.
The works that you will be able to see in different parts of laboral, City of Culture, are remarkable for their conceptual heterogeneity, the diversity of options when choosing the media, as well as the plurality of the concepts on show. Almost all of them are conceived with the desire to go beyond the limits imposed by the classical disciplines. A tour of this work, with the aim of revisiting our recent memory in order to take stock of the present and think of the future.
In the Fundaçao de Serralves, continuing with the idea of reviewing memory, we are taking time out and in this sense, we are going to take a closer look at the idea of suspended time with the presentation of five works. Four of them share the use of video as the tool for temporal and spatial expression, questioning the linear interpretation of events. The work by Oskar gómez mata works with the notion of kaïros which means being properly synchronised with the whole. It describes the quality of time, or rather, recognising the opportune moment to act. Both programmes are completed by lectures and encounters aimed at contextualising the work of the artists and the production of content.
In September, In Arteleku. we are offering a workshop with Marten Spangberg and Tor Lindstrad (International Festival), a project that moves between performance and architecture, putting new forms of collaboration into circulation, hoping that they may grow within the cultural sector. Their project, “The Theatre” sets out to comment upon contemporary cultural practices and the economy through an active endeavour to construct, through work, a present-day alternative.
In addition, the documentary mugatxoan Hamar will be screened. Beginning in 2008, it shows images that reflect fleeting moments of the project.
As in the case of the documentary, the Mugatxoan 2009 programme takes a journey back through the ten years of the project, returning once more to visit places we have already passed through, in order for us to move on.
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From 7 to 19 September. Arteleku
Marten Spangberg and Tor Lindstrand
“Theatres are to drama what telephone booths are to the mobile telephone”
The International Festival project, “The Theatre”, in collaboration with Steirischer Herbst, has its origin in the performance of theatrebuildings. It is also changing understanding of the performance, and the objective of the project is to view the building in itself as a continuum, carrying on and existing. Every relationship is drama and every building is a stage.
Over the last 100 years, architecture and its conditions have changed enormously. During the same period, the same things have occurred with theatre. But what has happened with the theatre building and our understanding of it?
If theatre is theatre and a building is a building then the theatre building should be an exhibition hall or a building to do performances. The worst stage there is tells us that the building is there for doing static drama or that the context of the building is that of a theatre.
Regardless of whether it is a national theatre or a commercial theatre; it produces many relationships, which are determined by a specific social, economical and political context. Practice, practice, practice. A change of conduct means that we have to reset our brains for progress and invention. So the only way that we can assure this change is by rehearsing. International Festival is a project that
swings between performance and architecture, putting the new forms of collaboration that may grow in the cultural sector into circulation. The objective of “The Theatre” is to comment upon contemporary cultural practices and the economy via an active attempt to construct, through work, a presentday alternative.
It isn’t a multidisciplinary room but it is a disciplinary-multi structure, specific to performance and architecture, which works through its disciplines towards multiplicity or almost towards a multiple notion of cultural production. It is activated by numerous connected steps, working like a think tank, but also like a multidirectional meeting point where many cultural agents and creative teams can share and produce experiences. This project transforms the theatre, for once, into a university, into a network building
and into a space for active confrontation, not only with what we see, but also with how we exist and so we become contemporary participants in our society, here and now; above and beyond national frontiers, via specific local contexts.
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Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg began to collaborate as International Festival in 2004 but they have worked together since the early nineteen-nineties. Moving seamlessly between performance, video and architecture, academic theory and pure entertainment, International Festival has taken a candyfloss machine to Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven to shoot sweet pink spots at the ceiling, has created a temporary kitchen in Berlin’s House of World Cultures, has turned a car park into a public plaza in the Tensta Konsthall outside Stockholm, has made several videos (After Pollock, 2005, a large screen with Jackson Pollock painting on the one side, while the
chimpanzee from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 pounds its piece of bone in slow motion on the other) and has its own publishing room and its own school called International Festival University, which has been housed by various museums.
