Eutopia Dystopia is the project with which we won the CivICa grant by Compagnia di San Paolo: let’s envision the future of Europe together through social reading and immersive performance!
Next autumn we will launch the project Eutopia Dystopia with Danish artist Inga Gerner Nielsen: an innovative combination of social reading and interactive performance to reflect on the European identity through the immersion in a dystopic scenario set in the future. An intimate and personal journey to (re)connect citizens to the foundations of Europe. But also to better understand current European challenges and the main drivers of change at the political, economic, social and technological level.
A sensuous journey to 2039
An energetic shock actually made it no longer possible to access our digital heritage and tools. A youth group has thus decided to create a resistance movement to rebuild our memory starting from the experiences of the citizens, collected in the form of stories, memories, images, artifacts, messages, texts.
Through the installation/performance Your Past belongs to Them Now – which will take place at Polo del ‘900 in Turin in November – the participants will be guided by a group of students/performers in a series of rituals and activities that will help them to gather and organize their memories. The audience will be invited to wonder about what happened between 2019 and 2039 and what led to such developments. The immersive activity will give the participants a sensuous feeling of being present in that future and allow them to contribute to the creation of a somatic archive of the European identity.
The textual materials and the scenario of the performance will be previously developed on the app Betwyll with a group of researchers, European artists and other subjects interested in the project. It is there that, in October, it will be possible to collectively comment on a series of literary, philosophical, political… texts, thus contributing to the creation of the imagery on which the performance will be based. The discussion space on Betwyll will remain open to debate with and among the participants in the performance, for its entire duration and immediately after, thus enriching the audience experience.
Are you a university student and would like to join the performers’ team? Apply to the open call!
A research project
The project will be the subject of an academic publication by professor Falk Heinrich, director of RELATE, the Research Laboratory for Art and Technology of the Aalborg University (DK), in relation to his studies on audience engagement and performance research. The research – which will go on throughout 2020 – will be an integral part of the performance and the social reading activity: the somatic archive produced within the installation, as well as the comments published on Betwyll in fact will be also part of the study.
A prototype of the project (in the picture) was realized in autumn 2018 with the students of his Art-Based Research course, at Vandyssel Teater in Hjörring, Northern Jutland.
Eutopia Dystopia is a two-year project realized with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo under “Bando CivICa, progetti di Cultura e Innovazione Civica”.