For 2021 we set aside our traditional festival format for one more year in favour of a virtual gathering – and “E-Fest”. From October 28 to November 10 we invite you to take in five new, on-demand performance video pieces created specially for this festival.
Each of the featured artists play with unique intersections of body and technology, exploring and transforming the blurred boundaries that define autonomy and creative agency. Each of the performances blend motion and sound – some using custom-built technology that extends the body as instrument; some using devices that become ‘performers’ in their own right.
This year VNM is presenting an electronic festival series of online events by artists who come from different practices and places to explore, share and exchange forms of instrumental and energetic sonic expansions with a variety of procedures and behaviours. What all of them seem to have in common is what Hannes Hoelzl (HAI Trio) describes as a “fascination to design interactive systems that delegate structural control to a degree where the performer is forced to become herself an observer, and [their] actions come to resemble navigation maneuvers at the borders of instability”. Like a process of losing yourself when realizing we don’t belong anymore to or within a planet regarded only within a paradigm of pure disposable profit.
It seems relevant to remember that we are still unable to regain full touch with our physical presence at this time. The longing continues, and it is a great exercise in holding attention, while trying to dismiss the pain. As such our lives and relationships (of any kind) become more visibly mediated by many external technological expansions (prosthesis?). Is there a way where embodying artistic energy we can maneuver that “instability” in creative and engaging ways? What is the “political” value, if any, of a creative gesture? What kind of polis will arise (in its most meaningful and original formative process) and how will it resonate within an emerging community?
If artistic energy manifests itself beyond intentionality, how can artistic behavior offer transformative experiences in sharable (real or virtual) spaces, without needing to become another object of curiosity or consumption? I guess this is the question everyone here is trying to answer, while offering possibilities, visions and inventions. “Gates” might finally open up to the emergence of the unimaginable, the nonsense of wanting. We don’t write books or symphonies because time and energy are burning fast, like lightning, in a crumble of time. We burn and freeze, textures and long loud breaths, solus – sonus – solis.
Thank you to all the wonderful artists, to the VNM staff, volunteers, funders, supporters and everyone who came to listen, to watch and to enjoy these events! If there are changes around us it is because we are that change, so thank you for being and staying with us.
– Giorgio Magnanensi
