The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Esther Belvis-Pons, researcher-artist and educator.
Keyword: Domestic Festivals
Barcelona 2010. In a scenario characterized by the financial crisis and
emerging social fracture appears the first domestic festival called ‘La
estrategia doméstica’ (the domestic strategy). The presentation of pieces and
artworks takes place in private homes. Friends, neighbours and acquaintances
offer a room or a space in their house for artists to perform there. The
festival tries to challenge the concepts of cultural enterprise and institution
by proposing homes as legitimate spaces for the artistic experience. At the
same time, the format wishes to transform the spatial and affective
relationships that the citizens have with the urban space, by inverting the
spatial dichotomy between the public and the private. Proximity, exchange and
artistic experimentation are the principles through which the expanded family
of the domestic festival grows. In 2011, this family finds homes in Santiago de
Chile, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, Brussels and it keeps on finding new locations
in Europe and Latin-America. Domestic festivals give one more turn to the
relationship between performance and space; artists not only occupy the public space but also the
domestic one.
The domestic space (the home) has usually
been the place where we learn about safety and confidence; it is the space
where first learn about affection and about identity and it is also a space
that builds community―being the family the first community we participate in.
Thus, the domestic space promotes values and becomes a fundamental site for
knowledge exchange and circulation. What happens when a family welcomes another
unknown performative family to occupy
their domestic space? How can we describe the relationship between the hosting
family, the audience and the artists? Would it be possible to transduce the
qualities of the domestic space into the public space or vice versa? Is it
possible to establish a more flexible city that allows spaces to have different
qualities blurring the boundaries of the public and the private? Which kinds of
exchanges can we set up between the domestic an urban space to promote urban
skills among the citizens?
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