This is the special section that Arshake dedicates to BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, a multimedia editorial project realised by selected students of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, thanks to a partnership between the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Romaeuropa Festival, and Arshake.
The 2023 edition, TRAME, will soon be online. This year it has taken shape in an interactive project inspired by the geographies of the arts that dictate the theme of the 38th edition of the Romaeuropa Festival. This new project will intertwine with the journeys made by artists and spectators to reach the theatres, the place where they meet, finding its roots in the intimate dimension that binds people’s bodies to the city, bringing the theatre to be the fulcrum of the relationship between the urban network and its inhabitants.
The project is taking shape and will soon be online. In the meantime, you can browse the articles published in these years from 2018 to the present, and the themes, modalities and approaches that at a retrospective glance we realise have been different each year, each year dictated by the historical changes that have passed through the peak of a great epochal change, experienced through the symptom of the pandemic. Here is a brief summary of previous editions. Stay tuned for what will appear on the site very soon.
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 through all the stages of preparation, from behind the scenes to the staging. The project transversally involved students of video, graphics, didactics and multimedia arts, young creatives from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, who, through text, graphics, photography and video, gave the privileged view of those who were able to experience the production of each work at first hand.
For the 2020 edition of the Romaeuropa Festival, ‘Con Tatto’, which found itself at a time in history marked by the pandemic, the online extension of this section – as well as some others of the Festival – made it possible to include artists who have creatively inhabited the space of the web for years. This gave the students the opportunity to imagine and realise a special version of BACKSTAGE/ONSTAGE: Back Onl(y)ne. Together with the works and artists, the gaze turned to the places and ways of using the works online, moving between the analogue and the virtual and making authorial videos.
In 2021 he went even further with AUDIENCE ON STAGE, which focused his gaze on spectators, on their behaviour and their way of relating to performances, on their attention and on what is produced in them, crossing all the genres of the Romaeuropa Festival, music, theatre, digital, prose, online performances. It has scrutinised the entrances, the halls and corridors of the theatres, the stalls, the stages, the mobile phones, the screens of online events, in search of the gaze of the ’emancipated spectator’, i.e. he or she who finds in the theatre 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 onto the stage through its mnemonic dynamics, it also placed it on the emotional plane, the same one where individual and collective memory meet in response to what the performance brings out in the spectator.
Now, for the 2023 edition, the spectators remain at the centre of the scene to bring into the spotlight their journey and the geographies generated in their path, superimposed on those of their origin, those of the artists, the settings and the position of the theatres of the shows in the urban grid. In the meantime, you can browse through the archive of past years, looking forward to the project to come.
