>> Invitation ExUF 2004

[anna balint]

From: <info at urbanfestival.hr>


http://www.urbanfestival.hr

On exUF 2004:

exUF is a project with basic tendency to infiltrate art into urban life and 
intensify communication between inhabitants with their city and its 
infrastructure.

One of the results of industrialisation process and increasing urbanisation 
is the construction of one’s “free time” – primarily as the opposition to 
working time. This firm and mostly unquestionable dichotomy actually hides 
the fact that, seen from the point of view of fluctuating capital, free time 
is a unique field. Especially in urban life it is quite planned, controlled 
and rather tradable. Considering we live in the time of production and 
consumption of cultural and symbolical goods free time offers the broadest 
space for consumerism. Who controls our free time? Who makes money on it? In 
which way cultural – artistic field functions as a market, as a place where 
goods and “additional values” are produced? What are public spaces and in 
which way do they function? What about privatised public spaces?

If it became as the consequence of striving for safety and order or escaping 
from the unpredictable nature, the city has managed to create a paradoxical 
construction of free time placing it under control. Therefore we are 
interested in artistic works that deal with the way in which everyday life is 
structured, rethink free and working time relation and free time annulation, 
consider the relation between private and public and also specific places of 
production / consumption of pleasure, fun, leisure or are interested in 
controlling and segmenting the everyday life.

Since Urban Festival does not want to be the manifestation trading the 
projects offered at the world market of art and deprived of any socio-
cultural context, but the means of probing Zagreb urban context / life, this 
year we have decided to give up on the three – part festival form. It will be 
substituted with weekend happenings through one month of “urboscopia”, which 
refers to four weekends in May (7 – 9 May, 14 – 16 May, 21 – 23 May, 28 – 30 
May). Once more we are trying to destruct classical festival form and 
following that have decided to change the name of this manifestation: exUF, 
meaning Ex Urban Festival.