EVENTO 2011, ART FOR AN URBAN RE-EVOLUTION:
THREE EXHIBITIONS, TWO SITES AND MANY EVENTS AT THE HEART OF THE CITY OF BORDEAUX

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From 6-16 October 2011, the second EVENTO festival will underscore Bordeaux’s liking of daring cultural adventures, by way of the carte blanche offered to Michelangelo Pistoletto and his foundation Cittadellarte. As an original, surprising and festive contemporary art event, EVENTO’s brief is to help reinvent Bordeaux in an ongoing way, just as Bordeaux strives to rethink EVENTO anew each time.
These distinctive features, which made EVENTO 2009 so successful and attracted more than 390,000 visitors, will be carried on this year by a new creative team, impatient to take up this artistic and urban challenge.
Every two years, EVENTO offers international artists an chance to cast a new eye over the city, explore it and turn it into an atypical place of artistic experimentation. This 2011 festival is thus bringing together famous and emerging figures, for a free event that is demanding, generous, multicultural, and designed for all kinds of public keen to discover and share.
Original works, collective experiments, performances, concerts, installations, exhibitions and games for the citizenry will all occupy the city’s public places and its museums, for meetings aimed at reinventing the city and finding new ways of living together.

As a major figure of Arte Povera, the Italian philosopher and humanist Michelangelo Pistoletto is persuaded that art must be at the hub of social and responsible urban change. As artistic director of EVENTO 2011, he has thus decided to link inhabitants and visitors powerfully together with the production of ideas and creative projects at the city’s heart, thereby illustrating the theme of the bond between art and citizenship.

This new EVENTO festival will thus be focused on the participation of many different kinds of public and the commitment of artists actively involved in collective works. Some 250 organizations (associations, local institutions, schools, and so on) will be taking part in the various projects.

Unexpected multidisciplinary encounters for many different participatory experiments and experiences

In order to fuel their line of thinking from many different angles, Michelangelo Pistoletto and his team have invited both artists and thinkers, all underwriting the role of art and the role of the citizen in the city, and representing some 20 nationalities and as many disciplines: visual arts, music, dance, architecture, urbanism, theatre, set design, design, network games, video, photography, philosophy, anthropology, economics, politics, ecology, mapmaking, geography, botany…

They will all adopt a participatory approach to EVENTO and, through their exchanges among themselves and with the different kinds of public, offer an echo of the artistic director’s belief, which he set forth back in 1994 in his manifesto Project Art:

«Art is the most sensitive and synthetic expression of thought: the time has come for the artist to assume his responsibility and create bonds between human activities, from economics to politics, from science to religion, from education to behaviour, in a nutshell, all the territories of the social fabric.»