After organizing our Wa(l)king the city event series during the summer of 2020, Placcc will return this September with another, smaller edition of our annual festival. The safety of our audience and our invited artists is paramount, which is why we will be following all health regulations in effect to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
And just like during our summer programme, our main goal will again be to provide opportunities and support to Hungarian artists.
2020 was and will continue to be defined by the Covid-19 pandemic, which will have an enormous effect on how we will organize our next festival in September. For one, we used up most of our annual funds to realize our Wa(l)king the cityproject in June and July, while second, we have invited works to the next festival where it is possible to safely social distance. This is why the fifteenth Placcc Festival will be held on a smaller scale, and will be as adaptive to the changing circumstances as possible.
However, we did not want to focus on the pandemic in terms of either conception or content when organizing the festival. Though the productions in our programme are varied in what themes and questions they raise (and these questions are indeed relevant regardless of the pandemic), the impact of the Covid-19 situation will still be felt in both the topics and questions posed by the invited artists. Questions such as: what role, if any, did the climate catastrophe play in the emergence of the pandemic? What effect did the pandemic have on the – not overly positive – way people perceive artistic creation as work? How can we overcome our fears, be they of the virus or of heights?
Placcc 2020 will have six main programmes. The festival will begin with the opening of a pop-up exhibition by Krisztián VÖRÖS (Piros), who created the visual design of all fifteen Placcc editions so far, including the current one, which was devised in an “analogue” way – in other words, it was inspired by an existing painting. Coinciding with the exhibition we will repeat four city walks from our popular Wa(l)king the city series held during the Summer under the title Re:walking the city. This time around everyone will have an opportunity to try out these walks in person, among them the Belgian Ine van Horen’s Blaha walk, Gergő JUHÁSZ’s Make it visible and Marcell MURÁNYI’s Bug walk – which were all aided by the professional team at ImagineBudapest -, while those interested will again be able to join Dávid SOMLÓ’s Ringing. Imre VASS’s part_time_job project is an exciting experiment, during which the artist will dance in a shop window everday for five days, four hours daily from Monday to Friday, calling attention to the unique connection between hard, physical labor and its artistic merits. We will also host the premier of Ziggurat Project’s new work, AWE, during which audience members will be able to face their fears by watching the artists scale walls to reach thrilling heights. As a part of Placcc 2020 we will also exhibit the central visual element of the Windstilleven (or Windstillife) performance created by Collectief Walden from the Netherlands. The large camera obscura was designed and built by students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. While we had to postpone holding the open air performance of the original artists because of the pandemic situation, we hope to host it in the future – perhaps as a part of the next Placcc – with the help of Hungarian performance artists. Finally, the Transforming Association (Átváltozó Egyesület) will prepare new challenges as a part of their Apocalype-training series.
We hope to see you all at this year’s Placcc as well! The festival programme may of course change based on the Covid-19 situation. Even though the pandemic poses a challenge to artists and audience members alike, it is the goal of our organizers that we stay true to the traditions of Placcc even in these circumstances, allowing everyone to see the streets, parks and squares of the city they live in from a new perspective thanks to the power of art.