SHAREs transnational action to open Transeuropa Festival

Transnational Action

Each year the Transeuropa Festival opens on October 4th with a transnational action taking place simultaneously in all Festival cities, encouraging participants to engage with their cities and outdoor spaces, and more importantly with others who are located in different cities throughout Europe. This year, the transnational action opening the Festival in 13 cities is the result of SHAREs, an artistic project run by European Alteranatives.

SHAREs 

The project SHAREs – Informing Transnational Action will open the Transeuropa Festival with a public transnational action. The public event will be the result of a workshop series lead by the artistic collective Ligna with artists from ten European countries and which focuses on the role and use of Radio as a communication and educative medium as well as a potential tool to explore the idea of collective action. Starting from Bertold Brecht’s theory affirming that “the increasing concentration of mechanical devices, as well as the increasing specialisation of education, require a sort of rebellion of the listener, his activation and his reinvolvement as producer”, the artists look at strategies of appropriation of a mass medium such as the radio and its relationship with public space.

Keeping in mind the recent and ongoing mobilisation taking place worldwide, the action will reflect on the relationship between new ways of sharing information offered by new technologies and the potential collaborative practices that emerge as consequences of that. The transnational action will become a public affair, as the artistic intervention feeds the results of the reflection process back into public discourse and its verdicts.

SHAREs is an 18 months long project conceived as a platform to develop a transnational collaboration involving cultural operators, artists, journalists, activists, philosophers, and students from 10 European countries including Germany, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Serbia, Czech Republic, UK.  The title as the project itself, presents a dichotomy based on the idea of an economy that is suspended between stock markets – whose dynamics and logics appear to be inaccessible to the majority of people, although their effects on people’s lives are extremely tangible – and alternative forms of organisation based on solidarity and on an idea of ‘commons’ which is re-invented and understood beyond any ideological connotation.

More details on the specifics of the action will soon be available on the Festival website!

European Alternatives activists try out the action in one of Sofia’s squares, over the weekend of August 24-25