SLOW DOWN Winter Performance Festival is a cultural booster that will run between 15 until 18 December at the Amstelpark in Amsterdam Zuid.
Winter is the season of the year in which nature regenerates itself, and we are taking this yearly period of hibernation as a metaphor to talk about our societies acceleration.
Slow Down Winter Performance Festival presents original productions created by artists who explore the boundaries of performance. It is a festival for artists with a unique view on the world and for audiences unafraid of questioning their own perspectives. A selection of 9 international performance-artist is presenting art pieces which durational nature, giving the audience the freedom of time consumption.
Paul Virilio’s essay The Aesthetics of Disappearance considers the motivations and repercussions of a contemporary society fascinated by speed. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower.
Virilio is precisely attuned to the culturally correlated obsession with moving (driving, flying, riding) at high speeds and viewing moving images. Everywhere, life seems to be speeding up: we talk for example about ‘fast food’ or ‘speed dating’, and these issues become essential while considering the structuring of a society in relation to modern media. Living in an accelerated state of the being, life is passing by. Since the abruption of social networks in the Internet era, this sensation of swiftness has become even more radicalized. The instantaneous communication across web 2.0 and the speed of interactions have created the feeling of a contradiction between an idea of constant presence and that of the disappearance of the body in a constant trajectory of ‘self-dissemination’.
Taking as an example the city tourism, we can notice that the cultural consumption has a tendency to trivialize and generalize the notion of travelling. Travel packages that most tourism agencies offer, for example, 'Amsterdam in 24 hours', can include a visit to the Red-light district, a boat trip through the canals, Heineken experience, and of course, the mandatory visit to Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, Hermitage and another of the 50 museums that the cultural program of Amsterdam offers, which will engross the statistics of cultural visitors.
In our opinion this cannot even be considered as art consumption, it is just artistic indigestion, mistrusting in some way the process of cultural comprehension.
Slow Down Winter Performance Festival, proposes to be a cultural reaction to this emergency situation. Winter is the season when nature takes the time to regenerate itself, a standby period that opens space for reflection and regeneration.
As creative individuals who belong to this hastened society, what we propose with Slow Down is to give a time alternative in the mode of an art practice being shared with Others. A committed winter attitude.
Slow Down Winter Performance Festival has counted with the support of:
Stadsdeel Zuid Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM FONDS VOOR DE KUNST
Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds
Art Direction
Production and PR
Documentation