Moving the city
Dear friends,
This year too, we are setting departure points of our movements in public spaces of city of Prishtina. We are continuing our inexhaustible exploration in a search for points that provoke departure in our common movements with the city. With those movements we will experience in togetherness the exploration of the limits and changing the perspectives of our city. While moving we will meet, co-create, have a conversation and sympathize as we move together. The moving of the city will produce images in motion transformed in a movie, whose protagonists are inhabitants of this city and its many visitor in these times.
HAPU this year opens with movements from “Liquid Loft” from Austria, masterly choreographed by Chris Haring, moving us to the court of Museum of Kosovo and from there many languages from across Europe, including the one recorded in Prishtina, will be echoed in our heads, associated with moving images created with finesse by Liquid Loft. Moving our body and hands, as instructed by Frank Bölter, we will fold together origami objects of real sizes that move with us. We will move them together to place them in points, from where our objects will ask with insistence the movements that have to be made for our common welfare. Another departure point of our moves we have placed in the premises of Faculty of Arts, from where you will start your artistic journey, created by Kunstlabor from Graz, Austria and domestic artists of Teatri ODA, moving in and out of “in between” zones, continuing this movements in the first days of August in La Strada Festival in Graz, Austria. On the move will be also the last night, with movements of actors in ups and downs of the newly created NOA Dance Theatre company in collaboration with Teatri ODA, under the care of the choreographic proficiency of Robert Nuha.
The moves of this edition of HAPU Festival are a product of numerous movements throughout the year, experiencing and enjoying European artists and moving the art and Kosovo artists at the European level in the frame of our partnership with IN SITU. This partnership has inspired us to create and to put these movements in the map of Prishtina and we are certain that in the same way will inspire you during the moves in our common space, and in this way we will be moving the city together.
Florent Mehmeti, Artistic Director, HAPU – Festival of Art in Public Space
IN SITU – the European Platform for Artistic Creation in Public Space
A growing number of artists are looking to working out of the box, in direct contact with citizens and local communities. Decision makers and planning authorities are increasingly moving to support artistic events that revive relationships between art and society, blurring the lines between spectators and inhabitants, actors and participants, consumers and those who commission art.
Together, the members of IN SITU, a group of programmers who are passionate about new forms of art and public space, reach close to one million spectators and have 15 years of shared experience. The platform, coordinated by Lieux Publics, European centre for creation, aims at increasing the European visibility of artistic creation in public space.
The expertise and activities of IN SITU covers scouting and promotion of artists, organisation of project laboratories and incubators, co-productions and promotion of emerging creations, organisation of conferences and seminars, etc.
To date, IN SITU has supported over 200 European artists. It gathers 20 partners from 12 countries from many practical and aesthetic backgrounds which all contribute something vital to the network. Whether members come from a sprawling metropolis or a rural area, whether they are seeking to rehabilitate industrial wasteland or redesign landscapes, the goal is always to serve artists working with, in and for public space.
Teatri ODA is the only member of IN SITU coming outside of the European Union determined to play a strong and fruitful role in this valuable European partnership.
IN SITU ACT 2016 – 2020 is funded with the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.