With Eutopia Dystopia social reading turns into a performance and brings us to 2039’s Europe.
From Tuesday, 18 September to Thursday, 20 September 2018 we will be in Aalborg, Denmark, to develop the prototype of a new TwLetteratura project on Betwyll dedicated to Europe, together with the Danish performative artist Inga Gerner Nielsen and Aalborg University’s Research Laboratory for Art and Technology (AAU RELATE), led by Professor Falk Heinrich.
The project is entitled EUTOPIA DYSTOPIA – Sensing and imagining of Europe through social reading and immersive performance and merges the paradigm of social reading with the performing arts to create a contemporary art performance – preceded, conducted and followed by reading and commenting sessions on Betwyll – in which the participating audience imagines Europe in 2039.
Eutopia Dystopia: Europe in 2039
In a dystopian scenario, in 2039 the European Union no longer exists, defeated by the return of nationalisms and by an energy shock that has brought the continent back to a pre-industrial state. A group of young people meets in an abandoned library and goes in search of the roots of Europe, rediscovering literary texts and artistic movements, as well as the thinking of the fathers of Europe, starting from Altiero Spinelli.
Through a performance by Inga Gerner Nielsen who, starting from the experience of the Danish collective House of Futures, has been experimenting with performing arts for a long time through installations that predict the future, the students of the Aalborg University will be involved in the construction of the prototype and the audience will become an active part of the performance, in which the objects and customs of our present will appear as an utopian past that has been lost, with the aim of reflecting on the – utopian and dystopian – scenarios still possible today.
Here, the two events of the Danish week of EUTOPIA DYSTOPIA:
- On Tuesday 18 and Wednesday 19 September, with Inga Gerner Nielsen we will meet the students of the “Art Based Research” course to test the performance prototype, whose design is underway since 2017.
- On Thursday, 20 September, during the event “The Day of Ethics “, the pre-prototype of EUTOPIA DYSTOPIA will be presented to the Danish audience.
Eutopia Dystopia and #Ventotene
For TwLetteratura EUTOPIA DYSTOPIA represents the European evolution of the #Ventotene project on the European community, citizenship and identity, which in 2018 saw and will see several Italian students read and comment on the Ventotene Manifesto by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi on Betwyll following the TwLetteratura method.
The EUTOPIA DYSTOPIA project, whose development is followed in Belgium by Hans Caron, aims to bring the same performance to various European countries (Belgium, Denmark and Italy), to raise awareness of the values of the European Union among citizens and encourage debate on the future of Europe.