PASSENGERS
International Festival of Public Art
0ctober 6 - 13, 2007
Warsaw
City space, mobility, changing and attributing new definitions to situations and places form a set of ideas the organizers of Passengers Festival in Warsaw on 6-13th October focus on. Warsaw will be given a new train line, but also there will arrive a group of international artists, passengers of the city who will transform its scenery for a short period of time.
For the organizers of the festival a tram is both a source of inspiration, symbol of this enterprise, as well as a mobile platform to present art.
They are fascinated with the public of trams which transport crowds of strangers and link different districts every day. For a short moment of an apparent integration in the mobile stomach of the city its variety gets digested. The availability of this mean of transport is equally important. And the problems connected with its availability both on an artistic level and in the reflection on functioning of public space constitute a major area of investigation for the organizers of Passengers Festival, its participants and artists. A tram seems an ideal metaphor for these investigations. It becomes a kind of a mobile laboratory in which art gets verified in front of diverse public, opens towards renegotiation of its meaning, at the same time suggesting a new approach towards everyday city life. A choice of a tram as a major point of reference was dictated by the variety of its meaning. For a tram puts us under the charm of a paradoxical amalgamation of the mundane, nostalgia and romanticism. For some it is an unbearable fragment of their morning toil, for others it brings back their nostalgic memories of the first dates or escapades, for some it gets associated with burning barricades.
The artists participating in Passengers feed on these meanings, however they do not aim at any resolutions. They undertake hesitant attempts at designing mobile machines of imagination. They will be taken into the streets of Warsaw, inviting everybody into the new, imagined and sometimes simply utopian zones of the city.
The festival is dedicated to our tragically diseased friend Adam Falkiewicz.
