International Festival is a project initiated between architecture and performance presenting work in several cultural contexts. International Festival is all you could ever want it to be. More the real thing than Coke, a just done it in relation to Nike, it is free your mind and the rest will follow. It is music in your mouth and disturbingly healthy.

After its start in 2004 International Festival (initiated by architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer Marten Spangberg) has created a number of context specific projects both internationally and in Sweden.

International Festival is an open frame, or label, that stimulate and engages in very different projects, all in order to avoid the establishment of a recognizable practice. Their projects are constructed and realized in the blurry zones between aesthetics and utility, object and activation, architecture and performance.

International Festival deals with the notion of spectator/viewer in respect to collectivity. A theatre audience as well as museum visitors are conventionally addressed as a population, one people. The strategies of International Festival produce an audience/viewer that by taking part individuate him/herself. International Festival has not one audience but its audience is a multitude, a heterogeneous number of individual.

International Festival is not about interpretation but each and every audience member is producing the work itself. International Festival is formulated as a project that always finds and occupies holes in a context, and at the same time is a matter of being radically generous. International Festival in so not a matter of institutional critique but instead a generous gesture which acknowledges the heterogeneity of institutional frames.

Prior to International Festival, Lindstrand and Spångberg worked together both making performances, in particular “All All…” and “Artists’-talk”, and exhibitions, in particular a solo at Marres (Maastricht), where they elaborated a specific interest in reciprocal conditioning of space and performance, that time through 3D animations doubling the museum spaces.

After the initial project, a welcome package for Tanz im August, International Festival has created among others, a large-scale performance project issuing 25.000 plastic bags distributed to 36 countries, another the production of the perfume “IF”, distributed, also for free, as a choreography during a large scale dance manifestation.

A series of works “The Free Spirit” focused on the political implications of free drinks and the specific performatives of the bar. During an activist gathering International Festival turned into a local television network and made its own TV-programs. For Van Abbe museum “International Festival University” was created, including a space made permanent in the museum. Education and knowledge is central to International Festival, which has created workshops, engaged with digital platforms and communities, and published a series of anthologies.

The social choreography “The Kitchen” commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, were followed by a large scale staging of a temporary architecture, “my Market”, a reversed flea market including more than two hundred private enterprises and cultural institutions and agencies. Soft architecture was central in a collaboration with the cheerleading group “Goldflash” performing pyramids and other fundamental geometries in a shopping mall.

An 1800 m2 parking lot, neighboring an art centre outside Stockholm, was transformed in 2006, juridically and through design, into a public square, for which, among other things International Festival received the Swedish architect of the year award 2007.

International Festival has also created as a series of video works, published a ten-hour sound compilation in collaboration with Big8, and are central to the Swedish performance exchange organization “Inpex”.

The Theatre, International Festival’s largest project so far, consist of fully functioning and operative temporary theatre building. with capacity for 150 people, including the obligatory golden foyer. Designed and realized in the blurry zones between aesthetics and utility, object and activation, architecture and performance, it will for
three years be operational as a theatre venue in different contexts, programmed by local hosts. The Theatre will later tour to among other places London, Zagreb, Stockholm, Paris and Berlin.

International Festival: The Theatre is a performance and an architecture, a show and a building, a situation where ways of being together become tangible. It is a different performance, a different architecture that we construct individually through our engagement and desire to change the ways things change.

International Festival: The Theatre is a structure for activation. It opens for the opportunity to reconsider the situation theatre as a frame for knowledge production and social differentiation. It is 520 sqm of on-going processes, a theatre that changes on a daily basis, and that celebrates the occupation of time.

International Festival: The Theatre is a project that as process, production and product, including discourse production, whose intention, generated through methodologies of affirmation, enerosity and pro-activity, is to dissolve, even change, consolidating, defensive, guruesque, formations of knowledge applied on present society by a significant part of the cultural sector, although not hrough examples but an actual and fully functioning structure/performance. International Festival: The Theatre therefore does not, first of all, represent a certain politics but is producing a possibility for the emergence of the political.

The unconditional escape from what, existing as neither architecture or performance, corporate or cultural, facilitator or expression, frame or art, and yet each of these opportunities simultaneously, exclusively enables International Festival: The Theatre to contest traits of distribution, accountability and authorization in general, to intentionally perform a creative action understood as an exodus from sovereign frames .

The ambition of International Festival: The Theatre, outrageously overstated, thus is to praise what forces us to escape good will, consensual thought, and insist on bad will, which fundamental concern is to examine the reliability of claim, in favour of an open speculative operability that empowers us to venture all the way along the question that gave power to oblige us to think: how to produce incoherence where coherence rules.

International Festival is currently preparing their first full-length feature film. To be shot in New York city in the context of Performa '07, produced and exhibited at Storefront. International Festival is in collaboration with Van Abbe museum constructing an online based model for video display.

as of October 2007 (to be continued)