Art Festivals and the European Public Culture

The EURO-FESTIVAL project is a study of artistic festivals as sites of trans-national identification and democratic debate. Festivals are an important expression of aesthetic public culture because: Festivals are spaces and times of concentrated debate and social effervescence. In recent times, moreover, these debates are about issues of representativity (gender, ethnic, age-groups), hence relevant about what constitutes access to creativity. Festivals are particularly interesting examples of those sites in society where the performance dimension of culture is emphasized. Finally, festivals are about hybridization, cross-fertilization and mutual borrowing, hence particularly good examples of the ways in which local cultures get expressed using other cultures. he overall aim of the project is to analyze the way in which mixed- or single-arts festivals constitute sites of cultural expression and performance of relevance for European identity-in-the-making and for the European public sphere. More specifically, the project objectives are to: Explore how festivals use aesthetic forms to symbolize, represent and communicate social and political life (European / national / sub-national) from the perspective of different actors, including programme directors, funding promoters, performing artists and the audience. Study the way in which festivals frame the discourse of identity in relation to arts with particular attention to the local / European and local / global interfaces as well as conundrum of difference (diversity) and similarity. Analyze how festivals represent sites of competition for access to resources, status and power and how this competition impacts on debates about representation, openness and the public sphere. The Website www.euro-festival.org publishes news and data about the project’s activities and research in addition to providing insights into festival culture and creativity.