London Festival of Europe Opens!
The London Festival of Europe is an annual series of public events engaging with
transnational politics and culture, and exploring contemporary European society
and arts.
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The Festival opens on April 30th with events all over London on political,
artistic, and philosophical topics.
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Events take place the the Courtauld Instite of Art, London School of Economics,
Shunt Vaults, Rich Mix, and many more places!
Please see below programme. More information in the attachment.
THURSDAY 30th APRIL, 5.30PM
City/Multiplicity: Opening symposium, Courtauld Institute of Art, Kenneth Clark
Lecture Theatre, Somerset House, WC2R 0RN
Architects Stefano Boeri and Markus Miessen will talk with curator Hans Ulrich
Obrist about democracy and the city and borders and the city. The event will
propose a utopian approach to urban architecture and city planning, and will
refer to the recent events in London surrounding the G20, amongst others.
FRIDAY MAY 1st, 8PM
Opening Performance: Locus Solus theatre performance, Shunt Vaults, 20 Stainer
Street, SE1 9RL
Locus Solus is a cross- cultural performance bringing together museums,
universities, architects, visual and sound artists, dancers, choreographers,
performers, set designers, video artists, researchers, scientists and writers
from seven different countries for an evening performance between theatre, art,
and happening. It takes its starting point from Raymond Roussel’s novel
Locus Solus, about a mad inventor who can create living portraits.
FRIDAY 1st MAY, Midnight
City 2009, Artistic Parade, starting from outside Shunt Vaults: a modern
Dystopia
Following the closing of the performance at Shunt at midnight an artistic
procession from the Southbank to the city of London will take place. The
procession will run from Shunt Valuts, across the river, through Brick Lane up
to Shoreditch. The procession will be punctuated by performances, poetry
reading, public declamations and manifestos relating to the symbolic dominance
of the city of London over the futures of the peoples of Europe and the world.
The Procession will draw from the imaginaries of Blake’s prophesies for
London, Orwell’s dystopia in 1984, and Eliot’s Wasteland, amongst
other resources. Ghosts from Europe’s past will come alive and rewalk the
streets, alongside millenarian of the world’s future.
SATURDAY MAY 2nd
3pm Flaneurs sans frontiers Discussion at Cafe Oto, Dalston
SUNDAY MAY 3rd
Urban City Utopia Games
5pm: Film Showings at Arcola Theatre – The Games,
The Games
Made in February 2007, ‘The Games’ involved staging a surreal
alternative Olympic Games amid the sites (from junkyards and allotments to
Clays Lane estate) set to become the 2012 London Olympic Park. Elegant female
legs pop up from behind junk heaps, naked men throw hub caps across waste land.
What is happening? The Olympic torch bearer is an arsonist and the games have
arrived early and defiantly in the city as a surreal hybrid of art intervention
and urban documentary.
Dir. Hilary Powell
Village Underground,
Auro Foxcroft is a young man with a mission and Optimistic Productions have been
following his quest to provide affordable creative work-space in Shoreditch. He
has gone about this in an unusual manner. Decommissioned underground carriages
now look out over the east end of London sitting on their own little island of
old railway viaduct surrounded by construction works as both the city and the
east London line advance. An inspiring example of recycling in action.
Dir. Dan Edelstyn.
Optimistic Productions
6pm ‘Urban Regeneration and Artistic Resistance’: discussion on the
Olympic site, urban geographies and urban art at Arcola, with film directors and
other architects and artists
This will be followed by an artistic walk towards the Olympic site, a picnic and
film projections.
Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola St, London, E8 2DJ, 5pm onwards, free to attend
We leave Arcola Theatre at 7pm for the walk and projections. or meet at 7.30pm
at Hackney Wick station
MONDAY MAY 4th
Strangers into Citizens rally at Trafalgar square
The Festival of Europe is supporting the Strangers into Citizens rally at
Trafalgar square, promoting the legalisation of long term migrants in an
irregular situation.
The rally is at 12pm, and features a performance by Asian Dub Foundation amongst
others.
The Strangers into Citizens campaign is organised by the Citizen Organising
Foundation. See
www.strangersintocitizens.org.uk
WEEKEND 2
FRIDAY MAY 8th
The Choice of Europeans: Key-Note Election Debate, London School of Economics
Old Theatre 7pm. (free)
A key-note debate in the run up to the European Parliamentary Elections in June,
the largest ever transnational elections. Featuring senior figures from each of
the major European political groupings, addressing the major themes of their
manifestos and their visions of the future for democracy at a transnational
level.
Kapuscinski and the Other
Southbank Centre, Purcell Room
Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
7.45pm (£10 or £5 concessions)
‘All the inhabitants of this planet are Others meeting Others‘
(Ryszard Kapuściński)
Ryszard Kapuściński (d.2007) was a celebrated Polish journalist and
one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan writers. Reporting from Africa, Europe
and South America, he asked what it is to encounter other people, and what can
be learnt from situations far away that is relevant at home.
Anna Bikont, a Polish journalist who knew Kapuściński well, discuss
his inspirational, sometimes controversial writing with playwright Jonathan
Miller and Geoff Dyer, an acclaimed essayist, novelist and Kapuscinski’s
admirer, in an event which combines film footage and photography taken by this
great reporter, never previously shown in the UK.
SATURDAY / SUNDAY 9thAND 10th MAY, RICHMIX, BETHNAL GREEN ROAD
ChangeUtopia! Cultural Congress
The Congress for new transnational politics and culture is an annual appointment
exploring the meaning and potentiality of a post-national approach to the most
burning political, philosophical, and artistic questions of our time.
The Congress serves to isolate a key set of transnational political
propositions, discuss the background of globalisation and its effect on
contemporary life, and more widely explore the meaning of post-national
political and artistic engagement.
The Congress is the result of a process of six transnational encounters held in
London, Berlin, Warsaw, Bologna, Paris and Barcelona. The events touched on the
relation of art to society, the reality of migration and the north/south gap,
the utopia of the Mediterranean, and the dialectic of feminism.
These will accordingly be the crucial themes of the Congress. Taking place over
a weekend, it brings to London philosophers, artists, political theorists and
activists to discuss a broad but related range of philosophical, political, and
artistic issues.
It is free to attend, and open to all.
Participants include:
Scott Lash (sociologist, Goldsmiths)
Gilbert Achcar (SOAS)
Rasheed Araeen (artist and editor of Third Text journal)
Steven Wright (Canadian art critic)
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (Emeritus professor at Paris VII university, French
feminist)
Neal Lawson (director of Compass pressure group)
