PERFORMIGRATIONS: PEOPLE ARE THE TERRITORY

From April 2014 to March 2016 PERFORMIGRATIONS: PEOPLE ARE THE TERRITORY explored the intersection of public cultural performance, collaborative art-making and academic research on mobilities. It proposed a new understanding of ‘territories’, one that emphasizes the performative practices of the people that move toward, within, and through them. In the period April 2015 – March 2016, PERFORMIGRATIONS organized seven major collaborative art-installations across Europe and Canada, involving a variety of partners and audiences. A range of art forms and digital media platforms delineated a new, mobile territory that formed around stories, creativity, and shared cultural experience. During the same period, PERFORMIGRATIONS hosted a series of cultural events engaging people inhabiting different territories. PERFORMIGRATIONS stopped in Montreal, Bologna, Klagenfurt, Vancouver, Athens, Toronto, Lisbon, Valletta. PERFORMIGRATIONS provided the opportunity to interrogate preconceived notions of heritage, identity, and migration. It invited its partners to collaborate and share with its diverse audiences across many different locations, reflecting the complexity and creativity inherent of these notions. The convergence – and even collision – of new and existing media was used to heighten the experience of relocation, emphasizing interactions between newcomers and existing populations and institutions. PERFORMIGRATIONS encouraged collaboration in the making and dissemination of multiple interactive and performative art-installations. The purpose of this collaboration was to make apparent the mutability of territory as it is created and re-created by the movements of people across Europe, as well as between Europe and North America. PERFORMIGRATIONS: Promoted intercultural dialogue through the interplay between different experiences, focusing on European communities and diasporas across Europe and Canada; Renewed the dialogue between Europe and Canada, developing innovative strategies for exploring cultural, sociological and technological change; Created new linkages between local realities and international actors; Promoted inter-generational dialogue through a renewed interplay of new ICT/mobile media and more traditional forms of artistic and cultural expressions; Developed an innovative dialogue between different ‘agencies’ representing strategic departments from within different national realities: universities and research centers, festivals, cultural institutions, companies, foundations, associations, and communities; Promoted the trans-national mobility of people working in the cultural sector; Offered support for the trans-national circulation of cultural and artistic works and products. PERFORMIGRATIONS promoted awareness of complex and ongoing cultural processes linked to migrations, mobility and diversity issues through: The development of accessible MULTIMEDIA ART-INSTALLATIONS that toured Europe and Canada, conceived as collaborative projects implemented by all involved cultural actors (academics, artists, cultural operators and professionals, communities); The organization of a series of CULTURAL EVENTS to disseminate and discuss shifting migratory processes of belonging/becoming Europeans (or Canadians) among a varied set of audiences, accompanying the travelling installations and contributing to sustain the project goal, mandate and philosophy through time and space. To complete and integrate the art-installations, PERFORMIGRATIONS partners selected nine artists through a public call; their projects represented the involved realities in Europe and in Canada. In each city, one of the PERFORMIGRATIONS artists was given the opportunity to develop an individual project responding to specific cultural challenges posed by the local context, and in collaboration with the local team of professionals and academics. At the same time, the group of artists joined creative forces to develop a series of collaborative art-projects named MOBILE INTERVENTIONS that grew through the ongoing addition of materials as the installations move from location to location. Concurrent with the ‘solo-art projects’, and featuring the project artists, researchers and professionals, MOBILE INTERVENTIONS brought the work of the team into a dynamic dialogue with the spaces within each city. Using the suitcase as both leitmotif and as a physical object to house segments of the artworks, MOBILE INTERVENTIONS was conceived as a way to curate an exhibition, which can change over time, evolve, interact with local artists and conditions, and be transported to other locations. Rather than operating just in formal gallery spaces, MOBILE INTERVENTIONS was designed to operate in the interstices of events; the exhibition was therefore conceived of as a mutable, malleable, mobile assemblage able to adapt to the specifity of places, territories and communities. From April 1st 2014 to March 31st 2016, PERFORMIGRATIONS organized many cultural events across Europe and Canada. More than 20 events were designed in collaboration with local institutions, communities, and art galleries in dialogue with the itinerant and collaborative art installations. These events included concerts, performances, round tables, workshops and conferences. 26 events were developed in synergy with two renowned Festivals, one in Canada, one in Europe. In April 2015, PERFORMIGRATIONS cohosted 14 events at the BlueMetropolis International Literary Festival in Montréal, including readings and panels with celebrated writers and scholars, book presentations and ‘meeting the authors’ events. In June 2015, the Biografilm Festival International Celebrations of Lives in Bologna presented 12 PERFORMIGRATIONS events, counting film screenings, master classes and live actions. Finally, 12 events were organized along the two years of activities to promote and sustain PERFORMIGRATIONS and Europe across Canada. Thanks to the role played by the Italian Cultural Institute in Montreal in collaboration with Canada Cluster of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), many European artists, writers, researchers and professionals were invited to meet Europeans abroad as well as Canadians and contribute their perspective on our project timing issues: Diversity, Mobility and Change; being/becoming Europeans today. All these events completed the art installations and contributed to make more visible a shared ‘European territory’, within and outside the geographical map. Many stories were told and shared, in different languages and in different forms. PERFORMIGRATIONS became a lively piazza welcoming many different people.