I am delighted to announce that my project Nostalgia For The Future will perform at this year's Buffer Fringe. The performing arts festival has been "questioning sensitive topics, challenging and playing with dominant narratives, giving space to artists to express new ideas in innovative ways, enabling audiences from diverse communities to engage in dialogue, and initiating discussions to promote understanding since 2014."
Buffer Fringe showcases new and experimental work by local and international artists, and challenges physical and artistic barriers through the transformative power of the arts. It creates the environment to question preconceived ideas about the performing arts, and the relationship between artists and audience.
Advancing with the theme of Pockets (beyond), the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival aims to initiate a discussion on who is visible/invisible and why. Pockets become a space to start thinking about difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. They give agency to the marginal, the forgotten, the invisible.
The beautiful thing about Pockets is their versatility and nuance. Pockets are enriched spaces of resistance against the inhumanity of the new world order, but also places where we keep things we need or love: pockets contain and hide things, yet they also keep them close to us. Pockets can also be traces and remnants of the past that stay alive in the very stitches that comprise them. A pocket may even look like a blind spot; but blind spots oppose the logic of the main frame, go beyond the conventions and status quo.
Beyond implies a disturbance of direction, a restless movement. Beyond promises the future and yet acknowledges a sense of disorientation brought by the precarity of our times.
In Nostalgia For The Future, Inal Bilsel translates his musical works into a live multimedia performance with the help of two vocalists, a keyboardist, a bass player, and a drummer. The performance’s narrative unfolds across different forms of media such as video projections, cassette tapes, postcards, booklets, blog posts and audio-visual installations, collectively generating a complex but interconnected story world, addressing themes of nostalgia, childhood, and the memory of place.
Nostalgia For Future, similar to the concept of ‘beyond’, suggests a disturbance of direction. Catalyzed by a future rendered incompatible expectations, this disturbance manifests as disappointment. In other words, Nostalgia For the Future is the ‘failure of the future’, a yearning for a future that never arrived.
The performance will take place on the first day of the festival (7th October) at Rüstem Kitabevi.
Where?
Friday 7th October at Rüstem Bookshop
Saturday 8th October at Theatro Polis OPAP
Sunday 9th October at Home for Cooperation / Ledra Palace Buffer Zone / Moat
Friday and Saturday nights are presented in 2 Parts each (5 euros for each part) – audiences are encouraged to attend all performances! On Sunday 9th October, all performances at Ledra Palace Buffer Zone / Home for Cooperation / Moat are free and open to the public!