Impakt Festival Guide 2010

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IMPAKT FESTIVAL Utrecht «

Festival Guide

» 13 - 17 October 2010

Opening night An evening in 3 parts PART 1: OPPORTUNITIES OF ENTANGLEMENT Wed. 13 Oct. 17:00-18:30, Hoog Catharijne (Boven Vredenburg), free

What for one is the ideal destination for a day full of shopping and going out, is for another an example of failed city planning. Where can we start a festival about urban dilemmas better than in Hoog Catharijne, shopping heart of the Netherlands? The exhibition Opportunities of Entanglement doesn’t judge, but offers the visitor a grand overview of visions on our urban future. PART 2: WELCOME TO METROPOLIS Wed. 13 Oct. 19:00, Theater Kikker, Main Hall

In a varied programme all the main lines of the festival pass by. The curators and artists who are featured at the festival, give a short presentation on this opening night. Films, fragments and presentations from the festival are featured in a nutshell. Part 3: The Third Man / Erik Bünger (Sweden)) Wed. 13 Oct. 21:00, Theater Kikker, Main Hall

The Third Man is a project in the form of a performance lecture and a film and was made during a residency ast Impakt. It tries to trace the footprints of an elusive entity called ‘the Third Man’. It is this entity that takes up residence in the ecstatic body of Julie Andrews, turning seven innocent children into musical puppets, each one reduced to a note in the diatonic scale and it is him that lures the children of Hamelen along with his music. He is in the voice of every pregnant mother, bathing her defenceless foetus in song and it is him that Kylie Minogue means when she sings: “I just can’t get you out of my head.” In the performance, Bünger integrates scientific theories, philosophy and religion together with video footage and musical elements like vocals and inventive music boxes. In the footsteps of ‘The Third Man’ Bünger takes us along on a quest for the true meaning of music. Erik Bünger

Impakt Festival 2010

Matrix City

The 21st edition of the Impakt Festival will take place from 13 through to 17 October. In a city like Utrecht with a station area that is under firm reconstruction, we focus on the various different perceptions of what elements constitute a city and what a city should look like. With an exhibition in two shop premises in the Hoog Catharijne shopping centre, screenings of short films on a big Urban Screen at the Neude

Impakt Festival 2010 installs a temporary platform to meet the future perspectives of cities. Within Matrix City, Impakt’s thematic scope for 2010, the curators STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen, Rotterdam / Belgrade) and Kristian Lukic (Novi Sad) have chosen to depart from celebrating the technological or informational advancements of cities and instead through film, video and media art

square and an audio walk exposing the hidden undercurrent of the city’s electromagnetic radiation, Impakt directly ventures out into the heart of the city. The film programme in ’t Hoogt, the conference in Studio T and the large variety of activities in Theater Kikker all show the urbanization process in all its aspects and extremes. So, put on your big-city face and submerge in the dilemma of the city.

productions, performances, presentations and discussions focus on the growing urban entanglement. In the radical new worlds envisioned in the 1960’s and 1970’s, for the first time a ‘modern’ engulfing urban matrix was projected. This came at a point when industrialization, space age, computing and the emergence of digital media converged with the perceived possibility of a fundamental and liberating ‘makeover’ of our environment. Nowadays, while newly arriving citizens cut the ties with their rural background and become reliant on resources provided third hand, those that are already part of the

Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and writer who lives and work in Berlin. His work explores the irrationality of contemporary media and focuses on music as a manipulative force. In his work, music is never seen as something pure, absolute or abstract; on the contrary, music is regarded as a parasite living off our collective, cultural conurban system have little option to sciousness. step out. Urbanization - with its The Third Man is an Impakt promassive and centripetal, gravita- duction. tional power of growth - increasingly seems to act like a self-propelling machine. by a technological superstrucOn the other side, mass popular ture? Can we really be closer to culture and the climate change a utopian scenario where people agenda in combination with, for in cities can afford maximum instance, eschatological conspir- active leisure, play and minimal acy cultures construct elements necessity for work, as proposed of an ‘end of times’ zeitgeist that in some of the earlier radical new has the potential to amplify so- worlds? Do we encounter new cial or economic crisis beyond communities that challenge these rational proportions. superstructures - or are we closer How are these probabilities in- to darker scenarios where we will terwoven with a view of the city be controlled by a networked inas the generator of economic de- telligence and remain vulnerable velopment, social welfare and in- without the possibility of a ‘rural dividual satisfaction - supported backup’?


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