International Festival is a long-term project that operates between architecture and performance, emphasizing the performative potentiality of space and relations. International Festival brings in context-specific projects, challenging social conventions and ways of communication through methods of filling in, shifting via oblique perspectives and ontologies of exchange. International Festival dislocates performance from its dialectical dispositif in order to produce possibilities for multiplicity of production and performance where the spectator become activated.

International Festival performs the performance of the always already there.

What is a museum?
A place that inhabits exhibitions.
What is a festival?
A collection of events arranged to engage and pose questions.

The artist is somebody whose work is arranged to engage, to suit the corporate image of a certain museum’s or festival’s desire. The curator, festival director or museum boss is not an artist but the person in charge of arrangement and the supreme order of the complete organisation. What happens if these positions are shuffled? So that the artist is the one that proposes the shell, the director is arranged, the spectator the performer and the relations produced it’s object. Recently we visited Guggenheim in Bilbao. The pieces on display were easy to forget, but the building, the piece The Guggenheim, has etched its congenial facade on to our minds. We don’t first of all talk about architecture or space, but simply what this museum proposes as spectacle, as object, as event.

In the spring 2004 the international dance and performance festival Tanz im August in Berlin asked us, Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg, to create a work for the event. The duo, that since some years collaborates closely, began to formulate a proposal related to the commission, on the basis of expanding the field of performance. Was it really necessary to create yet another performance, another secure situation where everybody involved knows how to play their part? The response came in the form of a desire to make the festival, or event, itself a performance, however with a minimal gesture, in order to issues what we – as audience, performers, curators, technicians and others – already by participating perform, and what relations we produce. It was simply much more stimulating to think about what other performativities a festival event include, and how these could be dealt with in a site, or context specific manner which at the same time was not reproducing notions of authorship and conventional modes of artistic production.
The proposal was to create a welcome package to all participants under the label International Festival. The package, which almost all festival events create, however was created in order to generate differentiation and relationship. What new relationships could take place when two hundred festival guests wear the same bag, use the same kind of soap and when each package contains different DVD’s which can be circulated between festival participants?

Rather confused Tanz im August agreed that it was a great idea and International Festival started to create a corporate identity. It was important to produce the label International Festival in order to differentiate and specify how the project participated in the festival. To an extent the intention was to create the smallest possible gesture. Today the artist doesn’t need to produce something it is enough to change some things position, context, and that recontextualisation is also a kind of production. To sign, or label, something is a minimal version of such a recontextualistion.

To be commissioned implies to be placed in a specific hierarchy. International Festival preferred to turn this hierarchy around slightly, and decided therefore to create the welcome package, something that the festival or any event hires some kids or unemployed to put together. International Festival at the same time became exactly similar to Tanz im August simply by labeling each and every moment with a complementary label. International Festival thus became a comment on the existing hierarchies of festival and event production. International Festival as an artistic project is nothing else than recontextualisation in order to produce differentiation of exiting relations between individuals, groups, humans and their environment. International Festival highlights the performativities of the everyday in order to make us aware of how we exist together and in the world.
The welcome package produced by International Festival in two hundred exemplars contained eighteen objects and was given over to all participants in the festival by the staff members. International Festival as a gesture was a matter of giving away 3600 objects, without any condition, without any other wish than to create pleasure. A festival guest confessed to International Festival, that he when sightseeing in Berlin was caught by a sudden summery rain. As he started to get soaked, insecure about how to solve the situation, a total stranger approached him, saying “Should we share a taxi?” As the guy hesitated, surprised by the somewhat direct question, the woman asking grabbed her shoulder bag and he recognized the same International Festival bag as he carried himself, and he answered positively. In the taxi they found out that they stayed in the same hotel and had a lot of things to talk about. Whatever happened when they arrived to the hotel all soaked and with the white International Festival t-shirt sticking to their wet bodies is something that we can only guess but we know it was not just that afternoon that was spent together.

International Festival deals with the notion of spectator/viewer in respect of collectivity. A theatre audience as well as museum visitors are conventionally addressed as a population, one people. The strategies of International Festival produce an audience/viewer that by taking part individuate him/herself. International Festival has not one audience but its audience is a multitude, a heterogeneous number of individual. International Festival is not about interpretation but each and every audience member is producing the work itself.

International Festival is formulated as a project that always finds and occupy holes in a context, and at the same time is a matter of being radically generous. International Festival in so not a matter of institutional critique but instead a generous gesture which acknowledges the heterogeneity of institutional frames. For Tanz im August this generosity was not only directed towards the guests but also a matter of giving the staff a situation of feeling good and generous.
International Festival is presented without the names of the artists or any representation of them in order to function as a machinery for the production of pleasure, an assemblage of abundance which transgress conventional economies of artistic production.

International Festival is luxury for everyone. It's everything you could ever want it to be.

International Festival is today Sunday 13 November giving a presentation of their work in relation to the plastic bag project at Mama media centre in Zagreb.

International Festival in collaboration with 6. Festival im Freien Theater Berlin 10 November 2005

Thank you everybody. You were fantastic. The Free Spirit brought us all closer. We saw the light, we brought capitalism to a new site and found that erotic spirit in us all.

International Festival The Free Spirit is an invitation to an altered state induced by the release of the temporary currency International Festival.

During the opening evening [11 pm. - late] in Theater Discounter The Free Spirit offers the audience free alcohol.

The Free Spirit opens a threshold between the physical and supernatural in which the introduction of a potentially malign market economy gives the audience the opportunity to receive unconditional happiness.
International Festival – The Free Spirit is a mediator between the spirits of people, spät kapitalismus and deep drunkness, an entrance to the secretly erotic in every being to be released by International Festival.

6. Festival im Freien Theater / FESTIVAL CENTER
Theater Discounter
Moubijou strasse 1
10117 Berlin

The ultimate plastic bag European tour starts today(oct 30). International Festival brings plastic bags to 50 theatres around Europe, with a gesture of generosity and with a curiosity far beyond Livingstone. Meet International Festival today (nov 4) on the roads from Paris to Geneve. It's about the importance of being plastic.

Today Nov 4 was an excellent day in Paris where we visited Colette and had a date with the Swedish Cultural Institute and lunch with the one and only Xinette in Cafe Beaubourg.

A terrific day on the road.

Check it out: Plastic Bag As Global Culture

Check out some other excellent articles about the plastic bag project

Today International Festival received images from its contribution to the Swedish design exhibition in Tokyo. An enormous amount of people entered the exhibtion and hundred of bags were distributed instantly. The population in Japan has shown great interest in International Festival plastic bag couture.

This is Hedvig in the balloon inferno in Tensta Konsthall. The day was so great that Hedvigs dad forgot the baby carriage in the Kunsthalle.

International Festival says Hallo from the road. The lousy rock band was at this moment still in a good mood, somewhere in Denmark. Today, 6 November, the band has arrived to Graz and are not as fresh, but still in a fantastic mood and really happy to move on tomorrow to Vienna.