transitstation for city partners and institutions

Advancing creative, educational and public engagement programmes

transitstation is a 24-hour multidisciplinary, hybrid live art event featuring genre-spanning performances, multi-cultural creative collaboration, and tailored education programmes for wider, increasing participation.

Premise

transitstation offers a dynamic and collaborative opportunity to the international artists’ community in Europe and Asia.

  • We believe in cultural exchange and open and transparent communication.

  • We seek to enhance the appreciation of diverse art forms through lively encounters with audiences everywhere.

  • We encourage the ongoing participation of established artists, and to provide new opportunities amongst artists joining the transitstation community.

Basis and artistic value

transitstation stands for: live art, performance art, performing art, live visual art forms, classical and experimental music, regional folk music, creative fashion, theatre, dance, film and video.

transitstation reaches out to emerging and established artists, with a new goal of integrating artists with physical and mental inhibitions.

We encourage open and transparent communication to enhance cultural exchange and wider participation.

Our institutional collaborations promote the development of live art and performance art engendered by the skills and resources of artists, curators, technicians, promotors and project partners.

origin of the idea

transitstation was founded in 2003 to develop the concept of exhibition as event. We set out to investigate the nature of liminal communicative processes shared collectively during a public event characterised by autonomous artistic productions blending with audience, observers and participants.

The middle ground of the event space is occupied by a 350 square metre scaffolding structure customised for each stop on the transitstation journey. The counterpoint to the scaffolding is a grand piano. The structure, in form and meaning, offers a different perspective.

transitstation is art in constant and changing motion and the search for navigating signs within the scaffolding structure.

The audience, observers, the public and the artists share responsibility for creating a participatory presence in the context of space, time and dynamic encounters.

During the performance weekend, live streaming projections connect international partners and artists in their experimental practice, in physical and virtual space.

 

music meets theatre meets performance art meets video projection meets dance meets fashion meets folk music meets poetry meets installation meets experimental sound art meets photography meets piano meets speech meets spectator

Relevance and impact

The context

The transitstation project creates opportunities for live interaction of analog and digital processes. We experience the evolution of the artists’ work in real time, sharing the physical and virtual spaces with recorded and live streamed digital work during the event.

The discursive reasoning of live art in cultural and socio-political positions reflect artist methodology and the communicative insertion of the spectator’s role.

Conventional understanding will be compromised and reissued.

transitstation contributes to the international artistic landscape by collaborative management of the project within regional, cultural country structures and with the involvement of public and educational institutions.

Today, virtual technology and live-streaming become part of everyday communication and participatory affect in public events, an experience forced upon us by the 2020 pandemic. Interestingly, the Icelandic volcano outbreak in 2010 presented transitstation with a similar challenge: transitstation artists then reacted immediately via mobile and virtual technology.

Reference

Performance Art: An Introduction (Khan Academy)

How Performance Art Took Over (The Guardian, July 2012)

Participation and Audience Involvement (MoMA, n.d.)

Educational programme

transitstation Monday EduAction Day

transitstation promotes mixed interdisciplinary methodologies in the production of art, exploring the production of art events versus the production of artwork.

transitstation presents Monday EduAction Day immediately following the 24-hour weekend event to further these goals. It is the aim to examine the meanings and values of live art and to explore its intellectual and pedagogical significance.

Local and guest artists, students, tutors, professors and members of the public are invited for discussion in an immediate response to transitstation.

Live Art is an investment of logistics connected with interdisciplinary methodology to transport and to transmit through the body the work experience. It entails parallel structures between known and unknown relations between the artist and the spectator’s roles. This is irrelevant of reception or apparent external impressions or aesthetic signs as they improve/expand ways of sense perception against the mind’s margins and expectation levels. The empirical induction is a small synaptic intermedial point at the cross road between definition and self-reflective experience.

transitstation artists’ talks and discussions during EduAction Day, Copenhagen 2010.

Artists’ Authoritative Voices

Barbara Kowa

transitstation Berlin 2005, Edinburgh 2006, Copenhagen 2010

I came to my first transitstation in Berlin with Muhannad Zidan, than I came with Markus Schaller to transitstation Edinburgh and next time to transitstation Copenhagen 2010 where we came together with Vest & Page who now organise a performance lab in Venice that I love as well. And I met many other artists I kept collaborating with including Barnim Schulze from Akasha Project who was with me in other works including the Seven Seals project that may have been inspired by the transitstation-utopia: we are all doing our thing BUT WE DO IT TOGETHER!

Dagmar became an important figure in my performative life and I love to see her perform or participate in other smaller festivals and Performance Lab Projects. The Idea that we are traveling and as we travel we become more, become whole with the totality of the world makes sense to me. Because we are all free individuals but we need to take each other by the hand as well.

Ram Das says, “We are here to walk each other home and we are on the road to now here.” A performative get-together is always this very sensual experimental experience. I love how in transitstation events we switch from being a receiver to a performer in the subjectivity of these relations.

Now, as the world gets more virtual and more controlled within ever more narrow borders I love to dream of performance art as a possible counter world. And I dream as tangibly as possible: how about a stateless performance lab on sailing ships?"

Kimbal Bumstead

transitstation Copenhagen 2010

transitstation is not simply a waypoint on a map, but a liminal space in progress. It was a confluence of artists and ideas, not as a product or a presentation but a point in which lifelines crossed, diverted and continued on new trajectories. Casting my mind back 10 years to the last transitstation in Copenhagen, I could say it was a turning point in my career as an artist.

Performance is integral to creation, since art is not just there, it is created. That process of making is for me the most important aspect of that thing that we call ‘art’. Both for the artists present, and the visitors who came to participate, the 24 hour happening was a transformative learning experience.