Extended Festival: opening / discursive programme

The Extended festival, co-organised by the Istovremeno artists’ association and the MSU, opens up space for durational performances realised in different media, from contemporary dance, performance art, media art and sound art to literature and various hybrid formats. The name itself implies extended duration, a departure from the usual regimes of looking, creating and performing. Contemporary society functions through a rapid exchange of information that we process only partially. The accelerated way of life brings hyper-exposure to stimuli that have multiplied over the last twenty years or so, while, as a consequence, the ability to hold focus and attention on a particular content has drastically decreased. Social networks, marketing and media posts lie in wait for consumers’ attention, turning them into reactive and passive consumers of content that changes at great speed, resulting in a kind of overload and a change in cognitive capacities. Over-stimulation is a fundamental problem of contemporary Western, capitalist society. On the other hand, a market for mindfulness is developing, and mindfulness is coming to the centre of neuroscientific and cognitive research. Yet even this niche often succumbs to market logic, and users approach such content as they would any other market offering – trying out different trends and rarely staying with particular practices, so that they rarely achieve the desired changes. In order to create conditions for a step away from such conditions of life and work, we open up space for a different way of thinking about time, attention, looking and performing. It is a space of experiment in which we ask how long we can last together, and how much information we need and how much is enough for us to remain in contact with a work, with a performance or with ourselves. For artists it is an invitation to think differently about their own practice and to question different directions of extension – of aesthetics, ethics, media and identity.
Participants: dr.sc. Renata Geld, Andrea Milat, as well as participants and organizers of the festival (Monika Błaszczak, Tomislav Čuveljak, Tin Dožić, Martin Hargreaves, Željka Klemenčić, Kajsa Wadhia, Moa Franzén, Tove Salmgren, Marina Petković – Liker, Ana Škegro, Tena Bošnjaković, Josipa Bubaš)