09 Nov 2011

Exchange Radical Moments!

What is Live Art? When complete strangers at least take the time to consider each other, when they get involved in a process of encounter and exchange, or even make a commitment to a joint undertaking, then that's the form of Live Art featured at this festival. Then we're dealing with skills and qualities driven by Web 2.0 & Co., the forces that are making an impact on our culture right now.

EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival:
1 Festival, 1 Day, 11 Cities
Live Art all across Europe, simultaneously

Bitola, Macedonia, Chisinau, Moldavia, Liverpool, UK and Riga, Latvia stake out the network of locations at which the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival is being played out. It all begins and ends on Friday, 11.11.11 and consists of about 30 public performances, interventions and artistic events staged simultaneously in 11 European cities. Radicalism is the name of the game, pervading everything from the external form of this new international festival of Live Art to the individual acts of creativity it encompasses—60 artists from all over the world taking leave of conventional comfort zones to take a position amidst life itself and eye to eye with the audience members beholding what they're up to out in the streets and public spaces that are the primary venues of the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival.

As an American artist in Bitola performs his first ritual foot-washing on a random passerby and a young lady in Berlin simultaneously starts ringing doorbells and politely requesting permission to walk through the apartment on her meticulously charted path along the boundary of a square sector imposed on a city map, it's clear that a refreshing pause from normal everyday life has just commenced. Performances and interventions like these staged at selected locations throughout Europe on Friday, 11.11.11 are EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival's approach to producing an intensive encounter among the 60 participating artists, 300 individuals directly involved in the productions, and lots of audience members, some of them coincidental passersby.

The spectrum of Live Art as an art form—and thus the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! program—goes beyond the realm of a delineated theatrical stage, ranging from performances and art in public spaces all the way to interventions both subtle and drastic in nature. In this spirit, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool will morph into Tranny Hotel to serve as a freely accessible playground for transgender artists. Meanwhile, Beatrice Didier and Your Cousin PIA will be going against the grain back in Linz: Didier by asking passersby to give her a hug; Your Cousin PIA by insistently attempting to convince total strangers that she's their long-lost relative. There's lots more: for instance, a protest rally in Riga with no theme at all, Tarzan's unexpected appearance in Berlin's Marzahn neighborhood, and family stories told during 11 car rides.

Berlin, Bitola, Chisinau, Linz, Liverpool, London, Paris, Prague, Riga, Slubfurt and Stockholm are the sites at which the festival events will occur simultaneously. www.11moments.org is the online hub that brings together everything happening in conjunction with the festival in the form of simultaneous live streams. Plus, EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! is setting up two live, real-world festival nodes at Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben in Berlin and at KunstRaum Goethestrasse xtd. At Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben, Swiss artist Raoul Marek is designing a bar featuring just the right ambience in which to follow the live streams of festival events together with other Live Art aficionados.

For additional information, please contact:

Medienservice: Wolfgang Preisinger preisinger@fabrikanten.at
+43 732 795684 0, +43 699 816 10 282
c/o: DIE FABRIKANTEN, Promenade 15, A-4020 Linz,

Website: www.11moments.org, www.fabrikanten.at
Pressefotos: 11moments.org/press-promotion/press-photos/
Magazine with the whole program: English pdf-version www.magazines.11moments.org


This project has received significant support from the European Union in conjunction with the Culture 2007-13 program, as well as from the City of Linz, the Province of Upper Austria and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.