Festivals - Tartu

More radically, a site specific festival could be read as a plea for the comprehensive
reinterpretation of the city, its entire urban tapestry, its reappraisal, its futuroplastic
manifest. Take Malta, the site specific festival in Poznan, started originally around a
recreational artificial lake Malta, at the city edge, showing that a sport resource could
serve cultural purposes as well and appeal to a huge audience in an atmosphere of
benevolence and relaxation, despite steady beer drinking. For more than a decade the
festival has been moving towards the traditional city core, to rediscover and reposition
various forgotten and ordinary city markers, use performances to make the citizens
take pride in the traces of the Prussian architecture, and reclaim potential cultural
hot spots from the encroaching mercantile capitalism with its aggressive billboards,
neon slogans and standardized chain shops, always the same, in each city. Malta festival
sooths the pain of urban transformation from socialism into capitalism, with real
estate usually becoming a prime value and loosing its public character in intensifed
privatisation transactions. At the same time, by keeping the regime of public urban
space, Malta reclaims Poznan as a community of citizens rather than just letting it become
a mass of 600.000 accidental consumers. The festival even turns this traditional
commercial city, spared post-industrial debris, towards an appealing destination of
cultural tourists, at least during this festive summer week.
Of course, a festival could provide and profit from temporary structures, set apart
from the architectural markers and prominent heritage spots. Like medieval and renaissance
fairs, a festival erects its temporary festival city, its nomadic encampment,
its bivouac of tents and summer pavilions, as in Nuernberg in the nineteen-eighties
and for many years now at the lake shore during the Zommespektakel in Zurich. In
this pavilion/tent city Zurich regains some of its historic linkage with the European
avant-garde (Dada) and escapes its standard image, shaped by banks, jewelery stores
and affluent bourgeois respectability, allows its citizens and visitors some relaxed hedonism,
a bit of open-air extravaganza – and some extra decibels as well, combining
the pleasures of the beach, food and art.
The argument made here is to see a festival not only in terms of its artistic content but
also spatial engagement, penetration of neuralgic urban spots and their appropriation,
setting in the best cases a chain reaction of socio-economic, architectural and cultural
transformation, upgrading and development; and in more modest cases creating temporary,
exceptional zones of sociability and imagination, opposing the pattern of the
seemingly rationalistic, market driven commercial exploitation of the urban space.
2. 5. · Positioning and developing a festival
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When viewed as an organized ephemeral event – “an extraordinary event, in an extraordinary
place, at an extraordinary time”, if we may borrow from Wagner – a festival
would appear to be the ideal “cultural product” on which to experiment and use