A participatory festival, a large, joyful and varied artistic-cultural ecosystem, not only to watch but to experience as well as to develop artistic moments together in public space and to take the opportunity for creative discussion and dialogue on most pressing topics of the future.

The Cirko Vertigo Foundation carried out the project in collaboration with the Italian partners Comune di Mondovì, CFP CEMON and CIAC and with the coordination of Federico Fazari. The festival was developed in the context of Piazza di Circo, an event organized by the L’Albero del Macramè Association.

“Thanks to everyone’s commitment, the DIALOG CITY Hybrid Festival has succeeded in its intent: to create an authentic dialogue, both in physical presence and through digital tools, but first and foremost with the citizens and spaces of the City of Mondovì that have generously hosted us. By using art and creative tools to understand that the future has its roots in the past and starts from the actions of the present, in order to be imagined exactly as we wish.” (Raffaele Irace, artistic director of the Hybrid Festival).

The Festival was officially opened by the vernissage of the work „News from Home“ by the artists Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy, a multidisciplinary duo selected by the Dialog City Art for Public Residence programme. Anne and Luke observed the local community of Mondovì for four weeks and entered into contact and dialogue with it through two workshops. The result of the artist residency: a colorful large-scale photographic composition that embellished the stone wall leading to the Belvedere Tower of Mondovì.

The Hybrid Festival was then divided into workshops and a new show format called 24 Hours x 24 Minutes, in which two dancers, Marco Volta and Rosalie Wanka, found themselves sharing a stage space – in this case different locations in the city of Mondovì – for 24 hours, at the end of which they presented a performance lasting at least 24 minutes, the culmination of the whole festival and which was held in Piazza Maggiore on the evening of Saturday 22nd July starting at 10pm.

A true innovation of the event was the possibility to follow the the performance remotely. The creation of 24 Hours x 24 Minutes was documented through the eye of the cameras for its entire duration and was broadcasted by the DIALOG CITY broadcasting channel and via the blucinQue Nice app both connected to the YouTube platform.

The work of the three dance and performance study workshops which were conducted on 21 and 22 July by professional dancers and choreographers Daniela Paci, Cecilia Castellari and Davide Degano converged in the final performance. The workshops, which involved about twenty young people, dancers and circus performers and which were held on the stages set up in Piazza Maggiore and at the Belvedere Tower, were defined as “experiences”: the first experience centered on the concept of discovery, the second on that of creation, the third and last on the concept of composition.

In addition to the 24-hour dance performance, a Game Jam was held at the Palazzo di Città di Mondovì and a participatory laboratory was created in parallel and in connection with the City of Aschaffenburg in Germany, the lead partner of the DIALOG CITY project. During this three-day workshop, citizens, students and project partners had the opportunity to develop game ideas together and then to design concrete game prototypes that are dealing with the most pressing issues of the future. Topics such as climate change, the current crisis and global interdependencies were negotiated in the Game Jam in order to generate innovative ideas and make complex connections visible in a playful way. The Game Jam held in both cities at the same time was facilitated by the Stefan Horn and Axel Watzke and was based on the methodology and output of a former Creative Europe project called “LABOURGAMES – the playful world of work”.

You can find the program of the HYBRID FESTIVAL here.

For more information please see here.