This is the special section that Arshake dedicates to BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, a multimedia editorial project born in 2018 from a partnership between Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Romaeuropa Festival, Arshake and realized each year by a group of selected students.
Each year the project takes a different form . The edition of Backstage/Onstage 2024 revolves around Intraspaces, or all those intrastitial spaces that connect technologies, artists, space, and spectators. These spaces take shape in the reflection of the young creatives of the academy in their confrontation with the show and the artists of the festival, with particular attention to the Digitalive review, curated by Federica Patti and addressed to algorithmic performance.
In the three-year period from 2018 to 2020, BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, followed and documented the events of DIGITALIVE, a section curated by Federica Patti dedicated to algorithmic arts, following it in all stages of preparation, from behind the scenes to going on stage. The project transversally involved video, graphic design, didactics and multimedia arts students, young creatives from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome who, through text, graphics, photography and video, returned the privileged view of those who were able to experience the production of each work up close.
For the Romaeuropa Festival’s 2020 edition, “Con Tatto,” which found itself at a moment in history marked by the pandemic, the online extension of this section – as well as some of the Festival’s others – made it possible to include artists who have creatively inhabited the web space for years. This gave students the opportunity to imagine and create a special version of BACKSTAGE/ONSTAGE: Back Onl(y)ne. Together with the works and artists, the gaze is turned to the places and modes of enjoyment of online works, moving between analog and virtual and making authorial videos.
In 2021 he went even further with AUDIENCE ON STAGE which focused his gaze on spectators, their behavior and the way they relate to performances, their attention and what is produced in them, crossing all genres of the Romaeuropa Festival, music, theater, digital, prose, online performance. He scrutinized the entrances, the halls and corridors of the theaters, the stalls, the stages, the cell phones, the screens of online events, looking for the gaze of the ’emancipated spectator,’ that is, the one or the one who finds in the theater a new kind of contact and closeness with others, but also a new connection with his or her own active existence.
For the 2022 edition, Flashback ONSTAGE, brought artificial intelligence to the stage through its mnemonic dynamics, also positioned it on the emotional plane, the same one where individual and collective memory meet in response to what the show brings out in those who attend.
In 2023 TRAME took shape in an interactive project inspired by the geographies of the arts that dictated the theme of the 38th edition of the Romaeuropa Festiva. Weaving together the movements made by artists and spectators to reach the theaters, the fulcrum of the relationship between the urban grid and its inhabitants.
Now, in 2024, the gaze shifts to the Intrastitial spaces that, visible and invisible, materialize in the inbetween spaces of each performance.
