Concept
The Museum of Modern Art, designed by Oskar Hansen in 1966 for the city Skopje, was a building of a variable shape and dependent on the needs of art. According to the architects assumptions, the museum would be "asleep" under the ground when there wouldn't be any exhibitions in it. The building would rise to the surface on the appeal for new art which is being born.
Drawing inspiration from Oskar Hansen's idea, one could imagine public space as a certain ephemeral museum, appearing and vanishing, moving and elusive. Museum which, with its specific form, serves the purposes of art. Art appears in city space, "scoops it up" for a moment, "creates a museum from its invisible walls" and is placed into the city's history before it disappears. The city space becomes remembered. The art events are "written in" the art program of places. City space is a potentiality which power and value is revealed together with art. The city's places change their character and regain or develop a meaning in the awareness of their recipients. This way the museum is in every place, where the artist wishes it to be. It isn't a closed institution in the hierarchised structure of the city - its possibility of coming into being is dependent on the artist's decision. Such open museum, functioning in a given historical place and appointed by and for it, forms itself a shape and story of this place.
Art in public space is set for dialogue, it creates new contexts, upsets with its uselessness, invites varoius places to its game. Deprived of decorative functions, it consciously disturbs the city's apparent harmony.
Open City is a new festival of contemporary art in public spaces of Lublin. The project involves the activation of urban space and the introduction of the artistic impulse in its structure. Its aim is permanent presence of art in public space of Lublin. We would like to transform the city into an inexhaustible area of artistic explorations, with no framework and limits.
The term "open city" originates from military language and describes a city which during armed conflict, is annouced by the authories in power to be undefended. The purpose of this annoucement is to stop the enemy from attacking and plundering the city.
The festival refers to the urban concrete fact - to the past and present of Lublin. The works of the artists discover and redefine places that have a meaning in the city space. They refer to Lublin's position on the East, on the outskirts of European Union, to the multicultural past imprinted on the material "tissue" of the city and also to the awareness of its inhabitants. They will uncover the forgotten spaces and establish new places of symbolic orientation in the urban structure of Lublin.
The artists will "note down" their own comments in the city space which is marked by history and modern problems. They will put their works under judgement and reflect of ordinary passers-by. They offer the inhabitants and people who are passing through the city new symbolic signs in order to find a local identity in a in a rapidly changing, incomprehensible, chaotic globalizing world. They'll determine people to reflect and perhaps revision, of the intimate relationship with the city.