Invisible Cities – Magic Carpets Year 3

A part of MAGIC CARPETS – Creative Europe Platform Project 2017-2021

Organized and curated by The Doing Group and openspace.innsbruck

 

Curating and project management: Peter Lorenz (The Doing Group) & Danijela Oberhofer Tonkovic (openspace.innsbruck)

Administration and production: Charly Walter (openspace.innsbruck)

Artistic partner organizations Innsbruck 2020:

The Doing Group

Heart of Noise Festival 

Sponsors Innsbruck 2020: Innsbrucker Verkehrsbetriebe (IVB) Pricher Druck

International partner organizations 2019:

Latitudo Art Projects (Rome, Italy)

Novo KulturnoNaselje (Novi Sad, Serbia)

Trempolino (Nantes, France)

The Magic Carpets project is funded by the EU as part of the “Creative Europe” program and supported by the City of Innsbruck, the State of Tyrol and the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture and Public Service.

Links:

www.magiccarpets.eu

http://openspace-innsbruck.com

www.thedoinggroup.com

www.heartofnoise.at

https://www.facebook.com/MagicCarpetsCreativeEuropePlatform/

https://www.facebook.com/styleconceptiondesignart/ 

Instagram:   

@openspace.innsbruck

@MagiCCarpets

@heart_of_noise

The process-oriented performance project INVISIBLE CITIES INNSBRUCK explores, documents and discusses a variety of these lived perspectives and invisible versions of the city. It all began with the reinterpretation of the novel “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino and ended with the investigation  to find new possibilities to make art together in a time of social distancing.

In the third year of the Magic Carpets project, we focused on participatory art and process-oriented methods that enable international collaboration between artists, curators and producers, but also offer the a pandemic-proof cultural program for public audiences to enjoy.

The international artist Nicola Di Croce from Italy (nominated by our partner organization Latitudo Art Projects from Rome) and the local artist and producer Peter Lorenz (who lives and works between Innsbruck and Berlin), were invited on residency together to develop processes and create works in the fieldsbetween performance, society, system-relevant art, sound and technology together with a variety of local artists. The results are be presented as part oft he Heart of Noise Festival (beginning of October) and afterwards at the Premierentage Innsbruck(in November). The presentation of the works will be complemented by a series of participatory workshopsand eventsin the run-up to the festival.

Nicola Di Croce developa SCORE to explore the urban atmosphere and sonic environments, the results of which will be presented in a multi-channel sound performance as a PROLOGUE in collaboration with the Grassmayr Bell Foundry and the Heart of Noise Festival.

Furthermore, a participatory workshop in a pizza box will be delivered as system-relevant art. It introduces you to the world of Innsbruck’s invisible cities and opens the imagination for the creative transformation of your city through description, sounds and forms.

All chapters will be documented on our website and shown as an epilogue in form of a mobile installation in public space as part of the Premierentage Innsbruck.

Together with: Peter Lorenz, Nicola di Croce, Philipp Schwaderer, Jan Contala, Stefan Rasberger, Eleni Palles, ludwig technique
With contributions by: Millena Meller, Lucas Norer, Andreas Ziessler, Lucaks Moritz Wegscheider and other

Realized by: The Doing Group, openspace.innsbruck, Magic Carpets and stadt_potenziale Innsbruck

Part of: Heart of Noise Festival and Premierentage Innsbruck

The Magic Carpets project is funded by the EU as partof the “Creative Europe” program and supported by the City of Innsbruck, the Province of Tyrol, the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture and Public Service. 

 

GENERAL: 

Every inhabitant of Innsbruck lives his or her own reality of the city. Local and international artists are working on a process-oriented performance project entitled INVISIBLE CITIES, tailored for the city of Innsbruck. A variety of lived perspectives and invisible versions of the city are creatively explored, documented and discussed. If we imagine the city as a book, the reality of eachcitizen represents an independent chapter. Collecting these personal cityscapes challenges the homogenized narrative of Innsbruck as a sterile old town for tourists and emphasizes the diversity that lies within the city.

 

Covid:

The original format with several workshops, imaginative interventions and participatory performances was to take place in April and May at different locations in Innsbruck’s public space. The project aimed at dealing with different perspectives from/on Innsbruck by working with different communities in bespoke formats. In response to the global pandemic, we asked ourselves,how we could continue to make participatory art in a socially engaged way in times of social distancing and the omnipresent possibility of another lockdown. With the help of local partner organizations, we want to continue to provide an inclusive and accessible format for the members of the communities we want to engage with. By bringing together the images and production elements of our previously planned chapters and continuing the established relationships with local partner artists, organizations and communities, we are developing an interactive object that enables participation.

 

Pizza box:

A pizza box is filled with a digital workshop device. This box can then be delivered, in compliance with all hygiene regulations, to anyone in the city who* wants to experience participatory art under any circumstances of possible Covid restrictions. In this way, socially engaged art can continue to be practiced asa system-relevant art delivery service,even in the event of another lockdown. Over the course of half an hour you will be introduced to the world of Innsbruck’s invisible cities and guided to use your imagination to creatively transform the city through description, sounds and shapes. Order your participatory art workshop now to your home for yourself, your family, community or group of friends and contributeyour personal cityscape as a chapter in the metaphorical bookofINVISIBLE CITIES INNSBRUCK.

PROLOG /SCORE With Nicola di Croce (Heart of Noise Festival):

During their joint residency as part of Magic Carpets Innsbruck, the sound artist Nicola di Croce from Venice and Peter Lorenz from the theatrand performance collective THE DOING GROUP worked on the project INVISIBLE CITIES INNSBRUCK. They interacted with local citizens, artists, organizations and public spaces to develop participatory methods and collaborative processes that enable us to make the diversity of Innsbruck’s sonic realities audible – even in times of a global pandemic. The collected field recordings will be combined with bells as sonic landmarks to explore urban resonances and create a multi-layered sound map of the city as a metaphorical indexof Innsbruck’s Invisible Cities. This site-specific multi-channel sound performance will be realized on the 2nd of October in collaboration with the local bell foundry GRASSMAYER and openspace.innsbruck as part of the Heart Of Noise Festival.

EPILOG (Premierentage Innsbruck):

All chapters will be documented on our website and the collected cityscapes will be exhibited together asan epilogue in the form of a mobile instllation in public space in Reichenau, Olympisches Dorf, Wilten and Hötting West. As part of Premierentage Innsbruck, the mobile installation will contribute to decentralize the perception of Innsbruck through creative activities outside of the city center, while at the same time pointing out the diversity of urban imaginings of INVISIBLE CITIES INNSBRUCK. A pop-up city model made of pizza boxes houses a variety of imaginative cityscapes, processed into short videos with the help of Eleni Palles. These creative versions of Innsbruck are now spatially juxtaposed with one another to discursively comprehend the identity of Innsbruck and to negotiate it together.

 

Peter Lorenz

already has been working as assistant director in theatre and opera  (including Scottish Opera, Vancouver Opera, Cologne Opera, Theater St. Gallen, Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik and Bayreuther Festspiele) while studying applied theatre studies in Glasgow. In addition, the young Tyrolean director and theatermaker has developed his own productions and experimental performances in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Canada and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he co-founded the Street Arts Festival Mostar in 2012. His works move between contemporary theatre, sound performances and spatial installations. In 2017,he adapted Elfriede Jelinek’s BAMBILAND as a one-woman performance at the James Arnott Theatre in Glasgow, and in 2018 he staged Gerhild Steinbuch’s HERR MIT SONNENBRILLE at the Theater diemonopol in Innsbruck, where he also redeveloped his solo choreography TIME DUST from the Ruins of Mostar for the Austrian premiere. Most recently, he designed the costumes and set design for the world premiere of Christian Spitzenstaetter’s opera STILLHANG at the Tyrolean Festival in Erl, which was awarded the Austrian Music TheatrePrize. In 2020, Peter directed the Scottish-Canadian co-production MORAG YOU’RE A LONG TIME DEID and received a working scholarship from the state of Tyrol to write a new play.

wwww.peterlorenz.at

 

Nicola di Croce

(proposed by the Magic Carpets partner organization Latitudo from Rome) is an architect, musician, sound artist and scientist whose research is situated between urban planning and sound studies. His research focuses on collaborative and participatory approaches to the analysis and design of new urban policies. He develops practice-oriented techniques by combining methods of sound studies with sound art. Nicola’s work consists of active and critical listening to urban soundscapes, which serve him as knowledge carriers to understand urban problems and to explore new ways of regeneration, participatory decision-making processes and local developments. He holds a doctorate in regional planning and politics and is currently a postdoctoral and research fellow at the Iuav University in Venice.

www.nicoladicroce.cargo.site

www.latitudo.net/art-projects

 

Philipp Schwaderer & Jan Contala

are students of architecture and designers, they live and work in Innsbruck. Their field of expertise is the experimental generation of forms, whereby they have specialized in newtechnologies. They explore possible applications for robotics in architecture and design artistic installations for the dialogues of digital-analogue and virtual-real. Their work has been exhibited at the Ars Electronica 2018 and inFreies Theater Innsbruck’s funding program Vorbrenner 2020.

https://www.brux.at/produktionen/vorbrenner-immersive-toni/

 

Stefan Rasberger

– graphic designer and photographer, born 1981 in Rum, graduated from the Advertising Design Academy and studied art history (Mag.phil) in Innsbruck. Since 2003 self-employed as graphic designer. In 2012 he openeda small graphic design office together with his wife Johanna, focusing on book/catalogue design and pictogram development. Small side project (also together with Johanna): The food blog republiknomnom.com. Stefan’s great passion besides graphic design is architectural photography. Artistic photographic works can be found on instagram: stadtbild.innsbruck 

www.labsal.at

 

Eleni Palles

works with architectural firms and theatres, participates in design competitions, exhibits her work, edits and designs printed matter, publishes texts in magazines and teaches. She is inspired by urban fabrics, vague terrain, transitional landscapes, early machines, urban and social utopias. Her creative practice focuses on installations with a strong architectural character. Spaces in which time slows down and changes, so that fictional and historical narratives merge with the viewer’s own experience and memory. As environments, they involve the viewer both physically and psychologically and promote shifts in consciousness through the ephemeral worlds they create. She currently teaches at the Institute for Architectural Theory at the University of Innsbruck while working on her doctorate.

https://elenipalles.com

 

ludwig technique (also known as Johannes Payr)

is a cross-media concept and performance artist. He describes himself as a “media-agnostic universal dilettante”, who generally works in very different fields: from software development to normal construction sites to theatreproductions (both on and off stage). A differentiation between “art” and “work” is therefore, according to his own statement, “actually not possible” for him, he prefers a holistic approach to life, the universe and all the rest.Thematically,he often works with recursive systems (e.g. feedback loops), just as the human body and the central nervous system is one. Currently,he is mainly concerned with action and perception in the context of space and society. “For me, art is a way of shifting the boundaries of collective perception, and thus an expression of the human urge to research, almost science”.

http://www.ludwigtechnique.net/

 

The Doing Group

is an international performance collective founded in Glasgow in 2015 by six theatrepractitioners who now live and work across the UK, Finland, USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Their sharedfascination with constant questioning through performative creation brings us together from a variety of backgrounds in street theatere, dance, clowning, theatrestudies, opera, foreign exchange, dramaturgy, stage design and direction. Thus we form a strong team with versatile skills and experiences, always trying to develop new performance formats. We have already successfully explored the themes of urban ecology (Rain Is Liquid Sunshine, 2016-18), global work (Elsewheres, 2017), myth (A Home For Nessie, 2017), energy ([un]physical things, 2017) and speculative futures(Future Currents, 2018), which have been presentedamongst othersat the James Arnos Theatre, the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Tramway in Glasgow and Temporary in Helsinki.

thedoinggroup.com

 

Magic Carpets – Creative Europe platform 2017-2021

MAGIC CARPETS is a four-year international program for the promotion of emerging artists in all fields. The project is supported within the framework of “Creative Europe” of the EuropeN Commission and enables artists to spend time abroad all over Europe. The primary goal of this “Artist in Residence” program is to establish a platform for the exchange of talent. The artists invited to the residency are involved in the cultural life of the respective host city by numerous partner institutions. Their ideas and expertise enable a synthesis of local and global perspectives on reality. The resulting works of art become a vehicle of encounter and exchange to drive current discourses.

The Magic Carpets project involves a total of 15 cultural and art institutions from EU member states and EU accession candidates. Austria has been represented in the project by the initiative “openspace.innsbruck – Verein zur Förderung der Alltagskultur” since 2018. The international partner institutions are: EVA International (Limerick, Ireland), Folkestone Fringe (Folkestone, Great Britain), Ideias Emergentes – Imerge (Porto, Portugal), LAB 852 (Zagreb, Croatia), Latitudo S.r.l. (Rome, Italy), META Cultural Foundation (Bucharest, Romania), New Theatre Institute of Latvia (Riga, Latvia), Novo KulturnoNaselje (Novi Sad, Serbia), Prague Biennale (Prague, Czech Republic), Tbilisi Photo Festival (Tbilisi, Georgia), KUNSTrePUBLIKe. V. / ZK/U (Berlin, Germany), Jam Factory Art Center (Lviv, Ukraine), Trempolino (Nantes, France), Kaunas Biennale (Kaunas, Lithuania), openspace.innsbruck (Innsbruck, Austria).

https://magiccarpets.eu/

http://openspace-innsbruck.com/