GENERATOR MALTA
People / City / Culture
Within its 23 years of existence MALTA FESTIVAL POZNAŃ evolved constantly. From a theatre festival it changed into an interdisciplinary festival of performative art, with theatre accompanied by music, dance, film and visual arts; nevertheless, its idea remained unchanged. The mission of the festival remains to present distinguished artists, discover new talents and co-create important artistic projects, but also to build such an atmosphere that encourages being together in the public space, sharing emotions, ideas and energy. Twenty years ago we cherished the newly-regained sovereignty and freedom, including freedom to gather. There was a need in us to experience things together in the crowd, while today we feel better in smaller and more local groups gathering people of common interests and needs.
Freedom is not a problem in the contemporary world. Freedom is there already. A question remains: what to do with freedom? We follow Tischner's trail of thought and research the topic of freedom, analysing choices made by individual viewers, residents, citizens. Going outside, we open to new forms of city exploration, undergoing an experiment and common creativity, which joins the city, people and culture.
The idiom of this year's edition of the festival - oh man, oh machine / człowiek-maszyna poses questions concerning the condition of contemporary humans, but also the role of an artist and art and place of culture in a civil society.
GENERATOR MALTA is a space made for affiliation, on the one hand a micro-city in a symbolic place, PLAC WOLNOŚCI (FREEDOM SQUARE); on the other - gardens in the districts of Poznań. This is an attempt at building space friendly towards artists which addresses their different needs. Together with young designers from School of Form and architecture studio Atelier Starzak Strebicki, we design GENERATOR MALTA hoping for it to be a platform of creativity, idea exchange and most of all - cooperation. A place to move the senses: taste, smell, sight, touch, hearing...
GENERATOR MALTA is a name of a wider project written into the city's topography and aiming at creation of new places. They will be small gardens, common agorae of local communities. Apart from Plac Wolności, we will visit five districts of Poznań. The plan is to cultivate culture (cultus agri, agri-culture) via organic work. With reference to the atavistic relation between humans and the soil, we start with creating a place together and with being together in a group of people who perform various social roles in their everyday life; including artists. Our experiment in cultivation of fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs is the starting point for a bond and a signal of a process which leads from cultivation to participation. This is also an educational project where everyone learns from everyone. The assumption behind it is: to unleash the potential of people who share common space every day, but remain strangers in the public sphere.
project curator: Katarzyna Mazurkiewicz