BORDEAUX.- From 6-16 October 2011, the second EVENTO festival underscores Bordeaux’s liking of daring cultural adventures, by way of the carte blanche offered to Michelangelo Pistoletto and his foundation Cittadellarte. As an original, surprising and festive contemporary art event, EVENTO’s brief is to help reinvent Bordeaux in an ongoing way, just as Bordeaux strives to rethink EVENTO anew each time. These distinctive features, which made evento 2009 so successful and attracted more than 390,000 visitors, is carried on this year by a new creative team, impatient to take up this artistic and urban challenge..

Every two years, EVENTO offers international artists an chance to cast a new eye over the city, explore it and turn it into an atypical place of artistic experimentation. This 2011 festival is thus bringing together famous and emerging figures, for a free event that is demanding, generous, multicultural, and designed for all kinds of public keen to discover and share.

Original works, collective experiments, performances, concerts, installations, exhibitions and games for the citizenry all occupy the city’s public places and its museums, for meetings aimed at reinventing the city and finding new ways of living together.

EVENTO 2011 : art for an urban re-evolution
As a major figure of Arte Povera , the Italian philosopher and humanist Michelangelo Pistoletto is persuaded that art must be at the hub of social and responsible urban change. As artistic director of EVENTO 2011, he has thus decided to link inhabitants and visitors powerfully together with the production of ideas and creative projects at the city’s heart, thereby illustrating the theme of the bond between art and citizenship. This new EVENTO festival is thus focused on the participation of many different kinds of public and the commitment of artists actively involved in collective works. Some 250 organizations (associations, local institutions, schools, and so on) are taking part in the various projects.

Unexpected multidisciplinary encounters
for many different participatory experiments and experiences In order to fuel their line of thinking from many different angles, Michelango Pistoletto and his team have invited both artists and thinkers, all underwriting the role of art and the role of the citizen in the city, and representing some 20 nationalities and as many disciplines: visual arts, music, dance, architecture, urbanism, theatre, set design, design, network games, video, photography, philosophy, anthropology, economics, politics, ecology, mapmaking, geography, botany…

They all adopt a participatory approach to EVENTO and, through their exchanges among themselves and with the different kinds of public, offer an echo of the artistic director’s belief, which he set forth back in 1994 in his manifesto Project Art: «Art is the most sensitive and synthetic expression of thought: the time has come for the artist to assume his responsibility and create bonds between human activities, from economics to politics, from science to religion, from education to behaviour, in a nutshell, all the territories of the social fabric.

The «Roots» project : three pivotal shows, devised by committed guests and artists
The “Roots” project is made up of three exhibitions which illustrate the creative context chosen by the artistic direction for EVENTO 2011, so as to embark on its “urban re-evolution”. The artists invited here cast an eye over Bordeaux’s historical, artistic and urban upheavals and goings-on. This at once retrospective, contextual and forward-looking exploration is being undertaken with three of the city’s Museums : the Musée d’Aquitaine, the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and arc en rêve centre d’architecture.

Historical roots The central theme of this exhibition is modern slavery in our contemporary societies, linked with the Musée d’Aquitaine’s rich collection about the three-way trade and slavery in the 18th century. William Kentridge, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Marzia Migliora, Wael Shawky, Michael Blum et Shilpa Gupta are invited, inter alios, to echo the museum collections with new works. This show sheds light on the fact that writing and re-writing history is not a static approach but a topical and vital one which brings out new relations, and new outlooks.

Artistic roots The Van Abbemuseum at Eindhoven (Netherlands), well known for its politically involved art collection, and its director, Charles Esche, are invited by the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, to put on the exhibition Strange and Close about the notion of “vicinity”. In the CAPC’s nave, the works of thirty artists present the negotiations and tensions which result for life shared in one and the same space.

Urban roots The exhibition, jointly curated by STEALTH.unlimited and arc en rêve centre d’architecture, narrates urban utopias and take the form of a fresco made by Bordeauxbased graphic artists and comic strip authors, themselves interpreting words penned by the writer and philosopher Bruce Bégout . The fiction, set in 2030, presents collective forms of organization, capable of anticipating new ways of making the city, based on a political commitment and new for ms of solidarity.