Art’s Summer Safe Spaces

Academies exist to provide a safe space for student-artists to freely experiment with new approaches and, more importantly, make mistakes. When the academies close, summer festivals take their place providing this safety. Contemporary Festival in Donori is one of these spaces, safely secluded from the public eye deep in the Sardinian countryside. In contrast to more prominent art events taking place in the European capitals, Contemporary Festival really is far away from the public (and the critical) eye. Organised by a group of Sardinians alongside the Trevi-based curator Maurizio Coccia, this summer biennial functions as a post-punk artistic residency-cum-electronic music festival.

Art strives to be seen and lives to be criticised and every gesture of an artist in public space carries an immense responsibility. Art is by its nature automatically written into history. For an artist to be able to express their intuitive urges and experimental gestures, those expressions have to be safely preserved in the artist’s own microcosm. This microcosm can be an academy, the artist’s studio, their students or, in our case, a festival. While most art events measure their success in generated output, Contemporary Festival doesn’t strive to be seen or live to be criticised, but rather aspires to form a temporary collective community to create ephemeral experimental artworks. I’m

In the epoque of hyper-capitalism, collectivism is nothing more but an idea of the past. The fluid collective and the temporary collective are the only collectivist forms that withstood the test of time. That is, of course, if we exclude institutional forms in our retrospective – institutional collectives function on certainly different grounds (e.g. academy classes, institutes, museum research groups). Being held together by the momentary common need instead of the timeless common idea, the fluid collective and the temporary collective constantly appear and disappear somewhat similarly as Augéan non-places. They survive the pressure of hyper-capitalist individualism only through transience – and virtual invisibility. Like petrol stations, airports or bus stops.

While the festival’s programme, the artists, the performances, the artworks seem important, we will not mention any of them and rather focus on the form. The form is the actual message. The rest can be easily read on the biennial’s currently-non-functional website. Having led an art festival myself, the religious quest for the perfect form (Holy Grail) became something internalised in me. The continuous questioning of forms, spaces and frameworks in search of the most effective, open, contemporary and whatever-other-hype-creating-adjective-one-can-think-of has only brought us to a circular crusade of experiments without any control to compare them to (Limbo). Art is not science. Donori takes form to a new level. Or rather, strips down the form to its new low in a gesture that despite its obviously anarchist nature, doesn’t seem anarchist at all, but rather spontaneous and sincere and eclectic.

Let us circle back (2nd circle) to collectivism. What is the common need (not common idea) the temporary Donori’s collective is based on? In a void of political ideology and dissolution of form, a reduction of expressions and needs to the bare minimum happens and the future members are collectivised through the common need to creative expression (Maslow over Dante). Needs-based interpellation substitutes the ideological interpellation. Our newly formed collective identity can start its function – creation. Contemporary Festival consequently has seemingly no rules, no structure, no framework, no form – but is rather identified and defined only by its basic function – creation. The biennial founder, Donori local Roberto Folessa explains:

“I had the idea of ​​the festival that I started organising one day by calling my friends who made avant-garde music and contemporary art. To create a place where artists from different parts of the world can join each other with artists who lived in Sardinia. A connection in the centre of the Mediterranean creating a resonance between artists and territory.”

Maurizio Coccia continues:

“All the results of the residency were ephemeral, so no permanent objects around the town or decorations on the walls. But, for about ten days, local people met contemporary art thanks to artists (living people) and not artworks (dead objects).”

Donori was presented to me as ‘the most random village I’ll ever be invited to.’ In its randomness lies its power. To create a successful non-place one needs a space that is so insignificant that it carries no contextual power over the place created there, but is at the same time strong enough to create an architectural framework capable of supporting (even though momentarily) a community. For better representation let’s imagine a culture of bacteria growing in a petri dish (8th circle). Donori is a village of two thousand, about a half hour drive inland from Cagliari. One bar (centre of social life), two grocers, one farmacy (closed when one needs condoms the most), one butcher (amazing organically bred beef), church, town hall, surrounded by sun-scorched vineyards (Cantina Sa Defenza’s natural wine Furau is a hidden gem) and giant blossoming cacti (don’t touch) covering the desert-like soil. The people of Donori, on the other hand, are special. Their immense openness and interest in the unknown continuously builds an invisible stage made of questions for anyone to step on, and answer – create. The village, devoid of content, becomes a perfectly gessoed canvas for the newly formed temporary collective of international artists and local villagers to cover in memories. Tekla Valy, a Finnish video-artist, one of the artists-in-residence, who for the first time in her career presented a performance, explains:

“It felt easier to throw myself into a foreign environment, I would have been more nervous to perform in my hometown. I feel that now it's easier to throw myself anywhere, even though it's always exciting, it's a good excitement. The beauty of the experience is also that it is completely open, without preconceived attitudes or expectations, like a tabula rasa.”

While non-places are defined by their insignificance, Donori’s Contemporary Festival is anything but. It is one of art’s summer safe spaces. Born out of pure love for art and creativity, it focuses on the interaction between the invited artists and the locals, aiming to engage and enrich the local cultural atmosphere, but its actual potential is way bigger: On New Year's Day in 1885, Sarajevo became the first city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to get a tramway line. By order of then emperor Franz Joseph, the tram was first installed in Bosnia in order to test the system for later use in Vienna. It was first operated by horses. After the tram, the city was the setting for some quite important events influencing the world’s geopolitics, most importantly, the start of the First World War. While we don’t want Donori to be the place where WW3 starts, what I am awkwardly trying to say is clear: With the power of ideas, one can travel “through chasm within the stone” into the centre of the Earth and come out on the other side “to rebehold the stars.” (Inferno, Canto XXXIV) Yes, it is that fucking hot in August in Donori.

Contemporary Festival is not about the singular artworks, performances, songs. It is, as Coccia puts it, about living people and not dead objects. Living people are carriers of ideas, living people are creators of memories, living people are friends. The myth of the solitary creative genius dies hard, and yet our aesthetic history is founded on shared sensibilities and inside jokes, on heated debates over dinner parties, on the common desire to burn down the house of our elders. On summer festivals in the middle of nowhere where ideas are born in dialogue and dreams are shared during sleepless nights.