Forecast Festival in the Radial System: City as a Radical Playground

The Forecast Festival offers artists from around the world the opportunity to work with experienced mentors. The goal: to realize artistic projects that… Break conventions. On Friday and Saturday the resulting works will be presented in the Radialsystem. It’s about in the eighth edition sustainable fashion, a post-punk performance, music, photography and film.

One of the participants The artist is Mari Kalabegashvili from Georgia. She deals with the subculture of passionate car lovers who meet in Tbilisi almost every weekend, organized via social media, at certain locations outside the center and organize nightly car races.

When Kalabegashvili first presented the idea for her photo project “If You Catch My Drift” in Berlin ten months ago, she already had a few photographs with her, which she presented in the classic way on the wall: souped-up BMWs in clouds of dust turning, young men whose faces are reflected in rear windows. As part of Forecast, the project developed into a photo installation on two room-filling screens; it grew into a narrative that leads from abstract, wandering city landscapes to concrete scenes, from the black of nighttime races to the light of the day.

Between the first sketch and the finished work there was a working stay in Beirut, a city characterized by wars, inflation and catastrophes, which has similar complex structures to Tbilisi. Further recordings were made in Albania, Croatia and Egypt.

Escapism as a survival strategy

Kalabegashvili, she was interested in the contradictory layers of a city and is looking for strategies Self-empowermentafter moments in which public space is converted into private space and the city becomes an “extreme playground”, usually in social and political contexts in which there is little regulation and the present is as uncertain as the future.

In Georgia, which fell into a deep economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was consumed by civil war and conflicts with Russia, and hoped for recovery and revolution, an urban landscape developed that Kalabegashvili calls “collage”. Apartment blocks from Soviet times mix with more or less intact old buildings, with brutalist architecture and bizarre new building projects, some of which were never finished, initiated by prime ministers who act as developers. Which rapidly changing city Car enthusiasts appropriate their niches and margins, making them the setting for a private passion in which they set the rules.

Public places and private spaces

They can’t let the police catch them with their tuned cars. It was her camera that gave the artist access to this isolated scene. The camera creates connection. Because they all want to have pictures of their adventures and are willing to have them looked at.

The Israeli-American filmmaker and writer Roee Rosenwho humorously and subversively mixes up characters from literary classics and history in his own work, is interested in the feminist side of Kalabegashvili’s project, the “female gaze– in contrast to the “male gaze” that Laura Mulvey described in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” published in 1975.

Instead of seeing everything through the lens of male heroes, in Kalabegashvili’s work, a woman looks at a male-dominated leisure world in which female drivers only appear as a very rare exception. The object of desire here is the car. In the artist’s subjective photographs, this classification also becomes blurred when the car becomes the hero and the man is just looked at.

Sexual violence against men

He was dealing with a big taboo Brazilian choreographer Gustavo Gomes, which was also supervised by Roee Rosen. As part of the festival, Gomes developed a film about sexual Violence between men. “Manhandle” explores experiences of violence and oppression in childhood and adolescence, and observes how they lead to obsessions and dependencies, guilt and shame in adulthood. The result is a 25-minute documentary in which choreography and film are interwoven. Together with his mentor, Gomes found locations and protagonists and ultimately developed a way to report on this difficult topic in stylized, aesthetic images.

And another example: In the project of Aidan Jason Peters from South Africa is it about Upcycling fashion, which transforms discarded products sent from Europe to Africa into haute couture. Problem solving through design is Peter’s approach. He created the new look with the support of his mentor, Irakli Rusadze, during a stay in Mexico City.