Community
Ticket sales for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts are run from a server in the Netherlands, but this should come as no surprise. If you order a pizza by phone in New York, you may without realising it get someone in India on the line who answers you in a perfect New York accent and can chat to you about the weather. Globalisation is an established fact, but at the same time it seems we still have a need for actual places. When the Studio Brussel radio station wants to create its own community, it doesn't do it only through the ether, but by organising live events or by opening a café.
It's been a long time since the world that individuals live in can be delineated as a single village, city or country. For anyone who surfs the net or has the right passport, distances and borders are of hardly any consequence. On the other hand, everyone who sits at a computer is at the same time in a particular village, town or city, and a specific country. People live somewhere, always come from somewhere and are someone's child. The places where they grow up and live mark their lives and add meaning to them. People belong to real, tangible communities.
On the other hand, one also chooses one's communities. Ideas, choices and tastes bring people together. An identity is formed by coming into contact with others. These contacts can be established on the Internet or through other media, but the existence of lots of communities still presupposes that the people who belong to them do actually gather together, in a café, for example, or in a meeting room, a church or a mosque.
Lots of communities identify with an actual place. These sorts of communities can encounter each other on squares, in streets, at markets and in parks, where their forms are challenged, reviewed and redrawn.
Every city is home to countless communities that were formed somewhere else in the world. Which is why the challenges of a pluralistic society are most visible there. The public space in a city is often fragile - it is sometimes poorly maintained, ends up in private hands or is put at risk by a lack of safety - but it is an extremely valuable gauge of the viability of a society.
Half a century ago, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt compared the public domain with a table. In 1958, she wrote, "Living collectively in the world means essentially that there is a world of things amidst those that live in it, just as a table is amidst those who sit at it; people are both connected and separated by the world, as by any other intermediary." In the midst of globalisation, the idea of a table everyone can sit around is still a powerful metaphor for the public domain in a pluralist society. A table always stands somewhere; there may be some junk on it and the people who sit around it may differ from each other considerably - for that reason alone they do not have to tell all their stories at the table - but without this table the world would not actually be a world anymore. The world would have become invisible and unheard.
Festival of languages
Things can be done on a stage that cannot be done in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, stage works do give the world meaning.
Where there is a world there is communication, and communication is language, and language is action. Art is a place where communication can become an experiment, and that's why it contributes to make an open society possible.
A work of art may concern specific social or political topics. When they are depicted or spoken about, they can be experienced or understood differently. Things we already knew appear in a new light.
Language is also used to describe things we do not yet know or recognize. The language of a work of art is autonomous and can thereby tell us something about an ideal world, a changing world or an inner world.
Anyone who creates a language believes that he is creating common ground. People can come from various communities and have differing ideas, but if they look at or listen to art, it will speak to them all.
In an explosive mix of bodies, things, images, words, feelings, ideas, voids and silences, a festival brings about a sort of realization that it is possible to talk and listen to others. A festival simply enables people to look at and listen to art together, and the mental and physical spaces thus generated and shaped also give a meaning to speech itself.
End v. Beginning
The media bring us calamitous news of terrorism, weapons, wars and a world in ruins. Perhaps the greatest challenge of our era is that of not lapsing into fatalism.
An imminent end means a forced beginning. The grand narratives of man and the world assume a horizon in time and space, and this sort of horizon stands out clearly against the light of an imminent catastrophe. Today, mankind is faced with a challenge that might be equivalent to the continued existence of humanity itself. The ecological issue presupposes a new grand narrative, which will probably no longer be based on liberation or progress, and will have to sound more universal than any other narrative.
Mankind recognizes itself in the light of an impending global catastrophe. The threat of an ecological disaster or a real apocalypse may bring greater cohesion. We can only take responsibility for our planet by means of a sustained globalization that goes beyond free trade, the Internet and the fight against terrorism.
From now on, a warm winter's day can also be considered the work of man. The experience of the blind forces of nature is nowadays often accompanied with an uncomfortable realization of responsibility. Whereas in the past nature was the very opposite of man's works, it too has now become one of his projects: mankind will have to save nature if it itself wants to survive.
Catastrophic tidings urge man to be more modest. This is shown by artists, who question the hierarchy of man and object. For example, they create worlds in which they let ‘things' speak for themselves: instead of people on stage there is a computer or robots or machineries. Dancers question the hierarchy of mind and body: they listen to their bodies and think with them.
Today, calamitous news presses man into an idealism that goes beyond dogma. The creation of a work of art always assumes a beginning. An artist creates: he is an idealist without dogma.
A work of art does not simply establish a fact, but also offers an alternative derived from the artist's personal perspective. Or else he looks for ways and forms in which a catastrophe, for example, can be narrated or depicted. How can this catastrophe be viewed without the sight of it bringing an end to our speaking about it?