Terminal 2019

Rethinking public space. Giving art the mandate to explore its potential and complexities. Offering the city a space in which human relationships can configure alternatives of thought and life. These are some of the objectives of Terminal, a three-day festival that is not limited to contemporary circus performances.

Two talks this year have given rise to a debate around “public space as a palimpsest” and the “geographies of shared space”. Raising barriers, imagining walls and making entire public areas inaccessible to use: far from guaranteeing the safety that our time needs, this attitude generates distorted perceptions about the capacity for self-sufficiency of communities, induces excessive discourses on the necessary protection of an impalpable future. What can we say about the future? What does “contemporary” mean with respect to the social function that the artist can play today? These are some of the questions that are at the root of the festival, which through a reflection on the city asks what role local cultural actors can assume in providing answers to the increasingly worrying social malaise.

The 2019 edition produced two new audiobus lines, an artistic experience that after two years of testing has become the hallmark of Terminal. In addition to the line produced in previous years, a tribute to the literary surrealism of Georges Perec, two other immersive experiences have been activated. In this way Terminal affirms its vocation as a producer of content, a meeting point between local artists and European artists. In addition to being a container of artistic products, the festival is also an opportunity for creation: it is probably the most important aspect of the event; because if it is true that from the last century we have learned how totalitarian ideology feeds on individualism and the massification of society, today more than ever artists and cultural operators must tell the world about the urgency of revitalizing communities. Who, if not the artist, can imagine alternatives to life, who can compose a new narrative about the world? Mixing different skills and artistic sensibilities is therefore not only an aesthetic experiment, but a response to those who feed on individualism by simplifying complexities in a simple communication. Thanks to adiobus, different skills and artistic disciplines can intersect. The mobile direction follows the audiobus, a normal bus, with a car and sends texts, songs and sound suggestions to the headphones of the spectators who are sitting inside, helping them to read with different eyes the performances that take place outside and inside the vehicle. It is a way of thinking about art in constant movement, not rooted in the site-specific scheme and yet in dialogue with the urban space. Thanks to this type of performance, the spectator is encouraged to glimpse the hidden meanings that the city can offer him. Architects, video makers, sound artists, actors, dancers and obviously circus artists are working on the creation of the same line. The two lines that have been added this year tell of two worlds hidden inside Udine: one travels a long introspective stretch, recounting the experience of a migrant who returns home; the other travels inside the reserves of irrationality that are hidden among the most rational places in the city center.

Terminal also continues its mission of helping companies of young students in training by trying to offer a work experience to those who have not yet entered the world of professionalism. This year the CMR guys, graduates of the CNAC of Chalôn en Champagne, came to the festival.

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