Peripheral 2017

The dream kneads the things of day and night,
the things of ordinary life
So that they endure with absolute serenity
To the powers of the negative.

– Sergio Finzi

Peripheral Festival 2017 – 

9th edition


High Fragile Urgent

The ninth edition of Peripheral takes place May 26-28 and was created to continue the reflections initiated by Amigdala last year among the disused workshops and businesses of the West Modena Artisan Village.

The themes that serve as the backdrop for the dramaturgy of this new edition of Peripheral arise where last year’s experience ends, traversed by the urgency of digging deep into the wounds of the Craftsman Village to search for new possible perspectives. Staying true to the nature of Peripheral as a nomadic project even in formats, we have chosen to entrust this area of the city with a second year of the festival, confident that we can still expand the horizons of work in this territory. 

One theme stood out this year as urgent and necessary:
can artists make transformations in places that seem cemented in their present?

In the difficulty of finding new words to talk about this place, we called two figures to the rescue, two anthropological figures: dream and art. To investigate not so much more the concrete and material structure of the Craftsman Village, as we did meticulously last year, but the cores of abstraction that make up its culture.
At the heart of the dramaturgy that composes
High Fragile Urgent
 there is thus a belief in the possibilities for the reactivation of the human imagination, which finds in the signs produced by the artist and in the dream its cardinal points of orientation. We do not understand the dream as a romantic myth, but as a system of action, which, like the theater, is able to hold within itself the residual symbols, the contradictions of which the complexity of reality is composed.

We convened several artists around these questions, to interrogate them together with us, asking them to produce new questions in the form of actions, performances or routes in the neighborhood. The result is a program of works that hold together abstraction and materiality, bodies and absences, narratives and visions, intimacy and collective spaces.
The public is asked to physically traverse the Craftsman Village to disused workshops, stores, streets, former railroad tracks, places of sociability, uncultivated meadows, courtyards, establishing direct dialogues with guest artists along the way.

This edition of Peripheral also inaugurates the launch of a new cultural hub in the city, curated and directed by Amigdala and Archivio Cesare Leonardi, which will be based in the former #OvestLab workshop thanks to a collaboration with the Productive Activities Consortium.
A pivotal moment for us, the beginning of an experimental pilot project in which, once again, we rely on the fertility of unexpected encounters and the ability of art to invent new forms of the world, new possible forms of circulation of meaning.