Peripheral 2018

Insolent
is the risk of the collective act, the undisciplined force that comes from the echo of a whisper, a motive for conceiving a fantasy of revolt and resistance. Insolent is the responsibility for the small fragment of transformation that an arts festival can help bring about: it is admiring its inadequacies and smears, and marveling nonetheless.

The tenth edition of the Peripheral festival took place May 22-27, 2018, among the disused workshops and businesses of the Artisan Village in West Modena, a place in the city created in 1953 by a courageous political intuition out of 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.
In fact, in 2016, Amigdala launched a three-year project centered around this historic area of the city, where the association opened OvestLab, a space for collective reflection and production on the future of the neighborhood, a “civic factory” located in a former artisan workshop. During its first year of operation, OvestLab worked crosswise on the rebuilding community ties, on public art interventions, on the development of design prototypes at the intersection of urbanism, co-design, mutual learning, publishing and civic economy, networking with other European “civic factories” in the CivicWise network.
Peripheral 2018 was thus born out of this continuity and is founded around the community that has clustered around OvestLab in recent months, investigating the theme of relationship, experimenting with models of co-habitation and the construction of collective visions for a few days.

What happens when you pass
From an individual logic to a collective one,
When building,
even if temporarily,
a “we?”

What political value does
the experience of an arts festival
In dialogue with issues of urban regeneration,
which moment capable
Of aggregating bodies, visions,
affections in one place
For a limited time?

Over the years, we have been searching for a way forward for the Peripheral festival that is deeply connected to artistic modes devoted to the relationship and reappropriation in aesthetic terms of affective experiences and relationship with places, yet without renouncing processes of rupture and friction, far from an idea of public space as a completely pacified place.
Periferico 2018 has been constructed as an open-air laboratory, where artists from Italy and Europe are called to “get to work” together with the community to produce shows, performances, musical works and installations that enter into dialogue with the territory, operating as language detonators and creating temporary public spaces within the Village’s private spaces. Is this one of the ways for art to become insurgent, to give itself a chance to re-originate something?