Festival SPA. The Art of Slowing Down Creatively



Across the world, including in the performing arts and cultural sector, we are increasingly confronted in our daily lives with overload, burnout, and the need for more balanced working practices.

To address this, three contemporary performing arts festivals – “Homo Novus” (Latvia), “Santarcangelo” (Italy) and “Mladi Levi” (Slovenia) – have joined forces to collectively seek answers to this issue. Four internationally recognized experts Julia Asperska, Marta Keil, Bek Berger, and Silvia Bottiroli have compiled a list of recommended readings and examples that can serve as inspiration and support for building more sustainable organizational structures and festival practices.

Within the European Union’s Creative Europe programme project “Festival SPA,” these experts are conducting an in-depth analysis of performing arts festivals and developing recommendations on how to find a balance between creation and recovery, intensity and the conscious slowing down of pace in a creative environment. We aim to integrate these insights into future events and festival practices. Following this project, a more comprehensive publication will be made publicly available, but for now we are sharing the recommended reading list.

Projects / Artistic Institutions / Festivals

  • Pause as Resistance, Tanzfabrik Berlin
  • Performing Life Akademia Network
  • Plastique Danse Flore – Dance festival in the vegetable gardens of the Kings Palace in Versailles. They offer sanctuary for dance works to exist in a relaxed environment. Audience members often fall asleep in the sunshine.
  • Arts Wellbeing Collective
  • Festival as a condition to think-with, ANTI Festival / Marta Keil

    •  
    Reading list

  • What Can We Learn from Tired Institutional Bodies? Some Speculative Exercises for Times of Exhaustion
  • Reimagining Care: 200 Questions About Care, Rubiane Maia
  • Whoever is Not Lost Does Not Yet Understand, Vania Rodrigues.

    •  
    Books

  • Artist at Work, Bojana Kunst
  • Queer Use, Sarah Ahmed
  • The Care Manifesto, Andreas Chatzidakis et al.
  • Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey
  • Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown
  • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary
  • How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell
  • Saving Time, Jenny Odell

    •  
    Artists whose practice offers / facilitates nourishing experiences for the audience and / or teams

  • SJ NORMAN – REST AREA
  • Verity Standen – HUG
  • Idio Chichava – Vagabundus
  • Tamara Cubas Multitud – Offering for a Monster
  • Spheres of Care – Performance Program in ANTI festival 2023
  • Nurture – Samuli Laine
  • Adrian Howells
  • Mara Oscar Cassiani – Be Water My Friends
  • Julian Ginzo – Marino Formenti
  • Florentina Holtzinger – A Year Without Summer
  • Ewa Dziarnowska – This Resting, Patience
  • Aleksandra Jakubczak – Worst Case Scenario

    •  

    Bibliography:
    Aranda, Julieta, Wood, Brian Kuan, Vidokle, Anton, Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, e-flux books, 2011
    Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, The Soul at Work. From Alienation to Autonomy, Semiotext(e), 2009
    Dietachmair, Philipp, Pascal Gielen, and Nicolau, Georgia (eds.), Sensing Earth: Cultural Quests across a Heated Globe. Antennae – Arts in Society. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023
    Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society, Stanford University Press 2015
    Hersey, Tricia, Rest is Resistance. A Manifesto, Little, Brown Spark 2022
    Kunst, Bojana, Artist at Work. Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Zero Books 2015
    Lorey, Isabell, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Verso Books 2015
    Raes, Barbara, Radiantly burning out and stacking stones, 2014,

    “Festival SPA” is supported by European Union’s programme “Creative Europe” and Ministry of Culture in Latvia. 

                 



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