Justin Shoulder: people don’t just need didactic work to understand
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
is a European cooperation project on hope. The hope we’re interested in is about ‘broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act’.
Parade of Horribles is a roaming devised work, combining performance, spoken word and projection to celebrate differences with empathetic humour and amplify consciousness around the psychological effects of Climate Crisis. Going from City to Town, spending time with community groups in each area to better understand their lived experience, their fears and desires to translate into imagery for the street. Audiences will happen upon, share, and remember images designed to start conversations. Parade finds ways to create empathy between people and rejoice in the vibrancy that difference brings to our lives.
Transforming Energy presents the latest work by the Berru collective and investigates the potential of the oceans as an element capable of responding to the challenges that the energy crisis and the management of natural resources pose to us today. This is a Collection Europe project, promoted by the ACT partners COAL (FR) and Culturgest (PT), and it is presented in the framework of Portugal-France Season 2022.
International festival Mladi Levi is one of the more prominent annual events of the Bunker Institute, bringing the most current stage performers from all over the world to Ljubljana every end of the summer, since 1998. It bears a mark of a demanding artistic profile, placed within the arena of contemporary progressive theatre and takes pride in its reputation for discovering young talents. The Festival has a distinctive atmosphere, marked with creativity and vibrant spirit, curious audience and social nature.
After the Collection Europe (ACT) project developed last year at the Mladi Levi 2021 festival, Škart, the pensioners from the Ljubljana Centre Retirement Home, and Bunker, gathered again for a workshop dedicated to environmental issues – endangered bird species. The working methodology still includes drinking coffee together, as well as a visit to the Ljubljana Marshes and a meeting with the experts from DOPPS – Birdlife Slovenia. A mural will be created on the wall of the Ljubljana Centre Retirement Home, which will remind us of the beauty of birds and the beauty of daily gatherings that are disappearing in time.
Raw materials around the world are becoming increasingly difficult to find; some are already running out, prompting large mining companies to turn to the depths of the sea. It is said that only about ten percent of the seabed has been explored – the potential of its discovery seems endless, and the desire for raw materials unstoppable. Four kilometres below sea level, a mining robot of the Belgian company Deme-Gsr scrapes the seabed in search of rare metals. On another ship, an international team of marine biologists closely monitors the operation. On board the third ship, the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace activists protest wildly. What are the implications of this possible future industry?
On April 8, 2020, in the middle of the first Covid-19 wave in Europe, artist David Weber-Krebs invited his colleagues around the world to participate in a collective act of imagination. He asked them via email to imagine the future of theatre from that specific moment when theatres were closed and it was not clear how, when, and even if they would open again. The answers were compiled in the book and then the doors opened again, which was published in September 2020 by Onomatopee.
Since then, the book has been used as a tool to generate further speculations and reflections about spectatorship in pandemic times and beyond. David Weber-Krebs and dramaturg Simone Basani have worked in different cities (Brussels, Skopje, Rotterdam), through walks around a theatre, conversations, online and offline workshops. In Summer 2021 they had a series of conversations with spectators of different ages, cultures and professions, in Rēzekne and Riga. All these encounters have been documented, their traces collected in the archive of and then the doors opened again. For Homo Novus 2022, David and Simone want to unfold the archive with a group of local artists and intellectuals as a starting point to explore the question: as spectators, what do we crave for now?
As part of the Transforming Energy exhibition by the Berru collective and the Temporada Cruzada França-Portugal, Culturgest and COAL present a double conference, the theme being on oceans and the interaction of humans with this global – yet sensitive – ecosystem. At the Culturgest Gallery in Porto where the exhibition will be on display, there will be a discussion between Berru collective, Clara Amorim, a biologist and specialist in acoustic communication of fish, and Olivier Adam, a specialist in cetacean bioacoustics. The moderation will be conducted by Samuel Silva, artist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Porto.
Latai Taumoepeau is an Australian artist. Her body of work spans more than a decade of presenting cathartic works about the impact and injustice of climate change on low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. Latai means reminisce and Tau-moe-peau means Battle-With-Waves. Her names are from her ancestors from the Island Kingdom of Tonga. Through her work, Latai has been mourning the eventual loss of her ancestral islands. She centered her indigenous concepts of faiva (performance) and fonua (land/body) in her contemporary work to raise awareness and empathy for front line coastal communities.
The soul is like an aviary filled with birds. It is a place where motion, colors, air movement and purposes become the flesh of what has been, of what grows, morphs, dies out, transmutes into a ghost. Chiara Bersani approaches the death of the swan with her work entitled The Animal: what happens when looking at the deep night we can recognize ourselves through the singing? (Giulia Traversi)
In December 2021, Nahuel Cano was traveling from Amsterdam to Riga. Janis Balodis picked him up from a ferry in Klaipeda. They were driving. It was late in the evening, already dark, and a severe snow storm started right after we left Klaipeda. They decided to take a smaller road, and there we hit a deer. “The Last Night of the Deer is a story about that one December evening when they visited Lidl, refueled LPG in Viada and met an anthropologist, hit the deer, crushed a skull, got covered with blood and feces, were running from dogs, and were barely accepted in a taxi. It is a story about all-too-human forests and the more-than-human spirits that inhabit it.”
