The 29th Malta Festival Poznań is taking place in an unusual time when the world around us, both the global and the local one nearby, is breaking down into many incompatible narratives and images. As Europeans, residents of democratic countries, we have become used to the concept that we live in the most peaceful times since World War II. What we tend to forget is that conflict is what determines the dynamics of our lives, our relationships within society and our opportunities. This why conflict, a tension between two states: war and peace, informs the Malta programme this year.
The Malta Festival is a unique meeting place for artists and intellectuals, people of diverse worldviews who share their knowledge, experience, passions and circumstances. Moreover, the Festival audience is not merely a participant, but also a cocreator. For this reason, the ten Festival days will be an amalgam of various projects: the Army of the Individual Idiom (curated by Nástio Mosquito), the community art programme Generator Malta, outdoor performances and theatre premieres (including Hańba, based on John Maxwell Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, coproduced by Stefan Żeromski Theatre in Kielce), and the Art Stations Foundation dance programme. All this will be accompanied by film shows, discussions and concerts. The diversity and general accessibility of the events is what gives Malta its special character and provides abundant opportunities to meet at the intersection of various disciplines, forms and expectations.
By creating a special gravity field in our everyday lives, we want the Malta Festival to trigger reflection on how we can take part in our reality, on how we care about it and on what we do not notice. We want the Festival to open us up to a variety of viewpoints, narratives and different types of sensitivity. The Festival stage is the city, with its architecture and public space, as well as the matters that are important to the residents. Hence, within the various programme sections we will be present on stages and in galleries, in neighbourhoods that remain on the margins of cultural life, in parks and squares, and also in the heart of the Festival which beats on Liberty Square, in the very centre of Poznań.
See you in Poznań,
MICHAŁ MERCZYŃSKI
Malta Festival Poznań Director