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17 - 28/06/2016

photo M. Zakrzewski
Galleryphoto M. Zakrzewski

“’Wasteland’ played without words and the conversations cycle “Building Conversations”, which you will present on Malta Festival, seem to have nothing in common”, enquires Aneta Kyzioł of the curator of the Viewer Paradox Idiom in an interview published in the weekly “Polityka”.

Lotte van den Berg: “What they have in common is the void, the fact that they are frameworks to be filled by the viewer with their own experience. In “Wasteland” the audience looks from the distance of 35 meters at an empty space somewhere on the outskirts of the city. A bird flying by, a train passing or the wind moving the trees may mean a lot as you are the one who ascribes weight to them. It is the same with conversations. “Wasteland” is about a fear of a meaningless life, about the feeling, which is normally pushed deep back, but which sometimes surfaces, that our life is meaningless. This fear is stronger than words, with which we grapple to describe it, it is easier to communicate it in images, in action.

While the “Building Conversations” project was created after we asked ourselves what it really means to cooperate (…). So, on one of the festivals we asked the audience, what they expected from us. It turns out that it is not another play, another work or stage design structures, because they feel they’ve seen too much of that – there are too many things, too many images. What they wanted was an opportunity to share their thoughts, to talk.

The program of Malta Festival Poznań 2016, which launches on Friday, features two projects by Lotte van den Berg – the curator of the Viewer Paradox Idiom: “Wasteland” and the “Building Conversations” cycle in three parts: “Conversation without words” , “Agonistic conversation” and “The Parliament of things”. The first conversations will take place next Saturday. During the festival the audience will also get the chance to see an audio-visual documentation of Lotte’s works. On Firday at 12.00 we invite everyone to Plac Wolności, where you will be able to talk to Lotte van den Berg in person.

You can send in your applications for The Spectators Group workshop until tomorrow. The workshops will give members of the Malta Festival Poznań audience an opportunity to watch plays, conduct discussions and have walks with the curator herself, the theatre director Wojtek Ziemilski, and Sodja Lotker, a dramaturge and curator of Quadriennale in Prague.