Festivals - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

PREFACE
Background
Tartu is a student city with a population of 100,000. It is located on the mainland,
far from the sea compared to other large Estonian cities such as Tallinn and Pärnu,
which does not make it attractive for tourists. At the end of the 1990’s, Tartu faced the
acute problem of being uninteresting in the summer. Students are out of the city and
there are very few attractive cultural events. Tartu virtually had no image event – its
own festival that would have acted as a tourist attraction both domestically and internationally.
In spite of this, Tartu had many cultural activists who organised smaller
festivals and events in their own field – in music, theatre or dance. However, none of
them was as strong or significant to deserve being made the image event of the city.
Content
In 2002, the Department of Culture of the Tartu City Government drafted the project
“Transforming a local festival into an international festival: How to produce a professional,
image-building city festival,” which was submitted to the Culture 2000 programme
for funding.
The main goal of the project was to widen the vista of the festival organisers of Tartu and
help them gain new experiences.
For that purpose contacts with Tartu’s twin towns interested in participating in the
project were established. Since the goal of the project was to share experiences and visit
new festivals, the main emphasis was not on learning about the content and creative
side, but about the organisational side of festivals.
A project team consisting of four people from Tartu, two from Ferrara (Italy), two from
Uppsala (Sweden) and one from Turku (Finland) was formed. The representation of
cities included festival managers as well as employees of city authorities, because, as
the project manager, the Tartu City Government was interested in establishing contacts
and cooperation on the local level. It was also important to involve decision-making
cultural employees who are closely related to financing and funding festivals through
their work.
During the project year, six festivals in five different cities were visited. Seminars were
held in each city, where the organisers introduced their experiences and where topics
related to organisation of festivals were discussed.
During the year, 2 Italians, 2 Swedes, 1 Finn, 2 Russians and 11 Estonians participated
in project-related trips to foreign festivals.
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