Peripheral 2016

Future Ancestor.
, the eighth edition of the Peripheral festival took place May 27-29 among disused workshops and businesses in the West Modena Artisan Village. A place in the city born out of courageous political insight from postwar social and economic tensions: the first model of an Artisan Village in our country, an area between the countryside and the city that held together life and work, manual know-how and enterprise, production chain and community belonging.

The themes that form the backdrop for the dramaturgy of this edition of Peripheral came about during a walk, along with initial thoughts about this area of the city and its present. At the center is the close relationship between art and craft, but also questions about the link between memory and change, through the extinction of an economic mode of production that is also an anthropological transformation of a territory.

During five months of participatory observation of the Village, we addressed these questions to the residents and to various thinkers-architects, economists, anthropologists-formulating meetings, interviews, analyses.

The festival was born on the foundation of these questions and the search for an artistic action capable of expressing them. We forced ourselves to wait, to walk through the Village day after day to listen.

Beginning with this fieldwork, Future Ancestor develops as a reflection on the relationship between fall and creation, between extinction and the future fate of those places where the lived still mingles with things, and continues to demand to be there.

Various artists from Europe, thought-provoking meetings, performances and installations traverse the Village confronting the urgencies of the present, working out a revitalization, observing what has yet to arise, what was never quite born, what was lost.

Searching in the din of the new and of the old coming together, through the lens of art, a buried but burning particle, a desire to celebrate again.