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About UF

Since its first edition in 2001 UrbanFestival deals with the questions of public space and the public in the widest sense through its thematic focuses and specific organizational forms. In the social climate of increasing privatization of public space, social atomization and a very intimate and individual consummation, it seems very important to keep opening and maintaining spaces of collective consummation, with the active participation of the wide audience and public. The program is regularly realized in public city spaces: streets, squares, parks, shopping malls, traffic infrastructure…, with the intention to broaden the territory of action outside the protecting walls of galleries and theatres, and on the other hand, animate the public spaces as spaces of co-existence, confrontation of different views, as well as possible antagonisms.

In an atmosphere of representative culture and an increasing number of festivals, UrbanFestival is thought primarily as a platform, a place of experiment, a structure ready to react to local needs and intervene in the immediate context. The understanding of the city as a space that exists independently of built-in objects and practices, as a place that regulates our everyday practices, city as an expression and means of state power or the cruel interests of capital, this understanding we have decided to replace with the political understanding of the city – city as a place that is always and anew produced by the practices of its inhabitants.

The format of the UrbanFestival implies new commissions and productions or adaptations to local context. From 2006 on the artists are hosted for a research; during these stays they conceptualize, prepare and work out the projects in very often close collaborations with city inhabitants, local institutions, NGOs, experts.

The projects realized in the program regularly evade traditional classifications, formal as well as disciplinary ones; it is multimedia, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, the overlapping of visual, sound and performing arts, as well as art with urbanism, architecture, design, sociology and other social studies and humanities that is fostered, aiming at holistic, innovative and multilayered approach.