Milan 12-14 July 2008

Art, Society and Urban Space:

The Second Edition of the IGVFest comes to Milan

The mobile festival of video art travels to the neighborhoods of Corso Como, Chinatown and Isola. The videos of artists active in the community as well as international artists will be projected on the walls, streets, and squares transforming the city into a living screen.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a migratory festival that integrates video art with the urban and social environment. The initiative was founded by the curator Jason Waite and had its first edition in Florence in 2006.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

The 2008 edition in Milan will be located in three different neighborhoods over three evenings, starting at 9:30 pm. The festival begins July 12th in Corso Como, then transfers to Chinatown (via Paolo Sarpi) on July 13th and concludes on July 14th in Isola.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to. The IGVFest engages the public on public territory, the site itself becomes an integral part of the presentation as its particular characteristics shape the context of the art while the videos add another layer of identity to the space.

Artists:

3P=3Players, 21bis, Alterazione Video, Anti-Advertising Agency & Graffiti Research Lab, Zhao Bandi, Raphael Copper & Li Qiu Qiu, Wu Ershan, Shu Haolun, Qiu Jun, Labratorio Mobile, Zhenchen Liu, Francesca Montà & Marthe van Dessel, Plaza Real Foundation, Mariette Schiltz & Bert Theis, Nadja Schrade, Jonathan Trayner, Marco Villani, Fiona Whitty, Chen Zhong

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

Festival Locations:

The map with all of the festival sites and times can be downloaded from www.igvfest.com.

In the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Isola the festival will be accompanied by the trip-hop group ilmionomenonhaimportanza. The acoustic moblie set will intervine at the different sites with contributions by musicians based in the area.

The IGVFest is organized in collaboration with:

Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto - Biella

Unidee-University of Ideas - Biella

Isola Art Center - Milan

La Pergola Social Center - Milan

Intelligent Alternative - Beijing