Witte de With festival 2011
Reconsidering everyday life values through art on the annual Witte de With festival in Rotterdam
Witte de With festival has always been a seasonal watershed of new trends for contemporary artists as well as a new sign for audience of what to expect from sophisticated art world. This year’s event was dedicated to the new approach of everyday life aspects with, for certain extend, popularized idea of environmental cognition. Mixed, bright, loud and inspiring, it left me with new conclusions concerning modern values.
For instance, in Witte de With Center for Contemporary art you could transform into a clown by dressing in colorful outfit with silly hats and wigs and watch short movie about clown's life and his changes in values on a tricky way to public success. Such bilateral participation immersed audience in key idea even more attaching sometimes very personal issues.
Free money for all!
The whole idea of global reconsidering of human values in terms of current globalized world could be tracked on each step of the Witte de With festival. Things that tend to be casual like housing and material goods were transvalued and shown in new, simple light. Recent budget cuts from the art and culture budget in Netherlands led to numerous waves of uncertainty and worries in society. Dutch artist Jeroen Jongeleen found a simple way of suggested solution – he simply printed thousands of fifty euro notes and left them to be thrown on the street. Free money for all!
The painful question concerning housing issue was solved by offering wooden 'hostels' near Museumpark so everyone could rest. On the bridge, there was a real process of manufacturing the bed. Life is more simple than it seems, and trendy environmental approach added lacking marketing accent to the general idea.
Witte de With festival 2011 was same and different simultaneously. The art shown was less shocking; I suggest the concept of beauty as we know it in traditional form is now coming back.
Nowadays, we all experience global transformation of values, and for sure artists were among first ones who responded to those changes in a very efficient and – yes – simple way.
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