Kraftwerk in concert at MoMa, photo: Galeria© Peter Boettcher
For the past several years, the annual Malta Festival programme has featured a selected Idiom. These Idioms are themes the organisers perceive as crucial for an understanding of contemporary reality, and especially Europe seen as a culture, a social situation and a future. The annual Idiom is curated by a different artist, and it is what determines the sphere of artistic and intellectual research, constituting a framework for perceiving the violent changes in our surrounding environment.
Following presentations of Flemish and Asian culture, an encounter with those who are excluded from society, and the festival's collaboration with Stefan Kaegi from Switzerland in 2012, the Malta organisers of have invited Italian genius and theatrical enfant terrible, Romeo Castellucci, one of two laureates of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Man, Machine
"Oh, man, oh, machine" is the Idiom of this year’s Malta Festival, and is an invocation, as festival director Michał Marczyński comments:
The relation between man and machine is becoming more and more blurred. Only a few decades ago, when the heart stopped beating, the man would die. Nowadays life is sustained by machines. We are often unaware of the relations, at times even intimate ones, that unite us with the machine, such as the first morning touch of the cell phone, an alarm clock, or a tablet on which we flip through the press. The festival is a holiday, but also a huge challenge, an attempt at creating an entirely new situtation, and new areas of significance for contemporary culture.
In his curator’s text for the Malta festival website, Castellucci states:
[…] we wish to consider the paradoxical aspects of technology’s presence among us, in us and for us, in light of the word technè which used to designate art in ancient Greece. If technè means art, then we need to once more assign meaning to the word machine, which ceases to have a practical function only. A machine can become a metaphor for life itself if life is put in the framework of representation. In its long history, theatre has been a mechanism enabling examination of life. When the dynamics of drama reached its limits, the critical point, 'deus ex machina' appeared […] Maybe for this reason, the machine of the stage enchants us with its cold splendour of living intelligence, which seems to be able to solve human and divine conflicts.
Castellucci shows his work at the festival, The Four Seasons Restaurant. The performance is a hypnotic journey through the history of images, a story of intransigence and risk related to every creative act. It was inspired by a series of abstract works by the painter Mark Rothko under the same title. The painter created it in 1958, having received a commission from the Seagram Building in New York. When it transpired that his works were to decorate an exclusive restaurant in the building, he resigned and returned the advance payment. In the show, Romeo Castellucci takes up the theme of world’s superficiality, with a human being is incessantly confronted with pictures, often empty and persuasive, serving the purpose of entertainment rather than cognition.
An Open-air Generator
The programme of Malta is diverse in terms of geography and generations, and the disciplines in which the artists work. This year’s programme will not only present works by acclaimed artists and discover new trends. It will also attempt to facilitate gathering together in public space to exchange ideas and energy. Generator Malta is an installation that hosts the festival club with gardens, restaurants and a meeting place, and it will be located at the Wolności Square in the centre of Poznań. Agnieszka Holland, the Polish filmmaker, and journalist Jacek Żakowski are among the confirmed guests of the club.
Michał Marczyński reveals that this endevour is a great experiment and a first time attempt at plunging the festival deep into the everday life of the city. Malta began in the 1990s as a festival that concentrated on street theatre, but both the character of the festival and that of street theatre has evolved over the years. The Generator Malta project aims to forge new relations between large public events and local ones conducted on a smaller scale.
The citizen-friendly space of the festival club is designed by young artists from the Poznań-based School of Form, a newly established innovative international higher school of design, which accepted its first students in October 2011. Students cooperate with architects from the Atelier Starzak Strebicki studio to create a space stimulate the senses of taste, touch, sight and smell. There are plans to conduct culinary workshops, classes of tai-chi, yoga and a session of playing in a recycling-orchestra, with old plastic tubes serving as instruments.
Polish Artists at Malta
Marta Górnicka also shows her new performance at Malta, entitled Requiemmachine. The piece engages a chorus of 25 men and juxtaposes texts and poetry of Broniewski with Benetton’s advertising campaign Become the Unemployed of the Year, as well as contemporary philosophic discourse and the widely familiar Imperial March from Star Wars.
Anther Polish director featured on the programme is Mikołaj Siegoczyński, whose Doll House is a new production from the Teatr Nowy in Poznań. Also coming from the Teatr Nowy is Marcin Liber's new production, a combination of Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Three Monologues by Dario Fo and Franca Rame, and fragments of the play Śmierć człowieka-wiewiórki by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, one of the most frequently awarded and staged Polish playwrights.
A legend of Polish independent theatre, Teatr Ósmego Dnia, come to Malta with their piece Ceglorz. “Ceglorz” is a colloquial name for the machine factory established in 1846 by Hipolit Cegielski. The factory aroused the interest of the group mostly through people linked to it - their beliefs, individual stories and dramas.
Outside of the genre of theatre, a noteworthy happening is the screening of Maciej Drygas' philosophical film essay entitled Stan nieważkości / State of Weightlessness. Drygas talked to Russian astronauts and their families, to a rocket designer, a pioneer of space medicine and to participants of medical experiments. His film portrays the constant human yearning for transcendence, technological development which should help achieve the goal, and the price people pay for their dreams.
Soundscapes of Information Society
The Malta Festival offers a unique chance to take part in a concert by Kraftwerk. Since 2005, when the group performed at the Venice Biennale, Kraftwerk frequently realise their musical projects also within the context of visual arts. This new move culminated in a retrospective at New York’s MoMA with eight 3-D concerts. The June performance in Malta is an adaptation of the project conjured up for that restrospective in New York. According to the organisers, Kraftwerk are authoring a soundtrack for contemporary information society.
Atoms For Peace are another special performance at Malta. The lineup consists of Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke and bass player Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as Radiohead’s long-term producer, Nigel Godrich (keyboard and synthesisers), drummer Joey Waronker (who has collaborated with Beck and R.E.M.), and Brazilian percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco (who has played with David Byrne and Brian Eno).
Their show is preceeded by the premiere Polish performance by Cat Power, the band led by U.S. vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Chan Marshall.
Editor: Paulina Schlosser, source: press release, 22.05.2013
Thumbnail credits: Romeo Castellucci, photograph by Marcin Oliva Soto