THE INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT FOR ELECTRONIC SCENES (TIMES):
BRINGING TOGETHER 10 EUROPEAN FESTIVALS DEDICATED TO ELECTRONIC MUSIC AND DIGITAL ARTS
The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes (TIMES) brings together 10 innovative European festivals and forums mainly dedicated to electronic music and visual arts and 1 audiovisual partner. The project gathers the festivals around stimulating new commissions and artist-led collaborations across the continent. Building on its 6 years of We are Europe cooperative project, TIMES is the next step aspiring to promote artistic and creative collaborations to actively work towards a better future for European music scenes.
In an era of dominating live music giants, surging hegemony phenomena, and rising fees, 10 European festivals have chosen to work together. Eager to introduce long-term collaborations in their practices, this approach will ensure greater sustainability in all its forms, build the conditions of more solidarity in the sector and boost opportunities for the electronic scenes. By connecting emerging artists with more established ones, as well as insuring their diffusion in some of the most influential European festivals, the 11 partners of the cooperation share the ambition of amplifying voices of artists and creators.
The partners of TIMES are:
- Nuits Sonores / Arty Farty. – Lyon, FR
- Terraforma – Milan, IT
- Semibreve – Braga, PT
- Insomnia Festival – Tromso, NO
- Sónar Barcelona, ES
- Unsound Festival – Kraków, PL
- Berlin Atonal – Berlin, DE
- Le Guess Who – Utrecht, NL
- Reworks – Thessaloniki, GR
- Elevate – Graz, AT
- Creative Broadcast – Bucharest, RO
CREATING ORIGINAL PERFORMANCES COMBINING MUSIC AND VISUAL ARTS
Festivals will be commissioning 3 original performances, developed by a selection of artists and researchers coming from different countries and disciplinary fields. Performances will reflect contemporary subjects and forms of arts, connecting visual arts and innovative music. Through itinerant residencies in festivals’ countries, the shows will then be performed in several countries during the co-producers’ festivals, boosting cultural exchanges and diversity of the European scenes
CO-CURATIONS TO BOOST DIVERSITY OF EUROPEAN LINE UPS
Each festival will be the host of 3 partners’ artistic curations. With an emphase on promoting a balance between headliners and emerging artists, mixing local, national as well as European and international artists, TIMES will foster diversity in festival line ups. Bridging new aesthetics to festivals, encouraging the mixing of disciplines and different local scenes, TIMES will create spaces of exchange and experimentation between artists end peers.
TOWARDS MORE INCLUSIVITY AND SUSTAINABILITY IN THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SECTOR
TIMES is committed to providing the festivals with the opportunity to train their teams and self-assess their practices to better address contemporary challenges. By defining collective values and implementing work methodologies, through peer exchanges and training programmes, the partners will work towards more environmentally compatible practices as well as gender and ethnicity balance, inclusivity-oriented practices, into TIMES activities but also into their own festivals.
DOCUMENTING CREATIVE PROCESSES
To further TIMES artistic work, the cooperation will produce an editorial work aiming at documenting the three years of creative collaborations and artistic creations, which will be unprecedented in their ambition at the scale of the European electronic sector. To do so, the Romanian studio Creative Broadcast has joined the cooperation to produce relevant content, sharing the artistic collaborations that are shaping the European electronic scenes. TIMES will also be teaming up with various European media and journalists to cover TIMES activities.
