Fast Forward Festival 2
The Onassis Foundation organizes for the second year the festival which focuses on the world of arts and performance, uniting the public sphere with the private.
The Festival took place during the 21st-31st of May, with the following activities under its auspices:
• video screenings (Chris Verdonck, Stills), where human figures especially designed for Athens made an appearance in corners of the city. You were not be able to miss them since their creators made them colossal;
• performance (X Apartments - Athens), where participants followed a route in unknown parts of the city and walked into apartments and places where you could find performances, installations, choreographies assembled by Greek and foreign artists, sometimes with the participation of the house owners/ tenants;
• a 6-hour movie (Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament) based on the book "Ancient evenings" by Norman Mailer. The highly anticipated work of the internationally acclaimed artist Matthew Barney was a unique cine-theatrical event, made up of the best part of New York, a harmonious coexistence of theater, opera, and performance art of remarkable beauty and seduction;
• a crowd choreography (Roger Bernat, Domini Public) by a true representative of the Catalan scene, which looked like a theater outside the theater, in a square starring the audience in a revealing three-dimensional game where participants had headphones, accepted questions from a voice and were divided in groups depending on their answers;
• a performance-film (FC Bergman, 300 el x 50 el x 30 el) where the theater connected with film as the upcoming group FC Bergman set on stage a whole forest and a village with 13 actors and 80 volunteers. Whatever happens inside the houses of the village has been displayed as a silent ceremony on a big screen with references to cult horror movies but also to the entire range of cinema, from Walt Disney and Ingmar Bergman until Roy Andersson, David Lynch and Lars von Trier, as well as happenings, visual arts and music videos!
The FFF posed some questions in relation to its concept: What is the role of art in bringing forth the heterogeneous aspects of an ever-changing society? Is it possible to articulate a critical reflection over the public control mechanisms through participatory art?
The Art Director of the second Fast Forward Festival described the Festival as the story of a dialectical relationship between public and private space, filled with non-traditional performances with the modest ambition to influence public debate proposing an alternative lifestyle to the dominant hyper-individualism.
Artists and groups of the second FFF critically incorporated the new technologies in their practice and brought the existent surface or possible ways of cohabitation in the contemporary cityscape.