Festival centre

The Tangente Festival Centre will be a public co-working space for workshops, construction, thinking and preparation. But first and foremost it will be a place to meet, exchange ideas, debate, celebrate and, perhaps, even to dream together of other worlds.

Local, regional and international realities will merge throughout the building process, from its conception to its realisation and use. The entire festival centre will be understood as a creative workshop. It will be de­signed in a collective process with local stakeholders and will contribute to the creation of a cultural infrastructure that will last beyond the duration of the festival. Collectives from the world of design and archi­tecture, artists, creatives, students and craftspeople will be involved during planning in the form of residencies and thus inhabit the project site as direct agents of change. Together, the Tangente Festival Centre will be conceived, built and activated in a process lasting several months.

Particitpation and hospitality will be the guiding principles.

As a suggested blueprint, we are thinking of an oasis, a space of pause and regeneration where creativity and imagination can flow freely. This will inspire all the elements and activities that populate the project spaces. In the Festival Centre we will create the conditions and places for affordable gastronomy, events and parties, introductions, lectures, gatherings, skill sharing, mediation and exchange formats and small shows and lectures.

The heart of the Festival Centre is an open mediation space for all. This consists of an info point, an archive of previous and ongoing Tangente projects, a library with a reading corner, a creative studio for workshops and a place for smaller events, discussions and know­ledge exchange. At the info point you can get useful information about the city and Tangente and buy tickets. At the same time, the Festival Centre is a meeting place for mediators and visitors, for cooperation partners and various community groups, for regular gettogethers, regulars’ tables, brunches and other activities – the heart and pulse of Tangente.

Co-producing space

BUrb will curate and coordinate the overall process of urban transformation through the opening of new material and spatial narratives, the reactivation of lost memories and the activation of interactive spaces of estrangement:

“Our goal is to develop a space full of unfamiliar, novel elements whose presence forces us to think of our world in a fundamentally different way. The process of building such a lived utopia should be reflected in the creation of the festival ­centre. We bring together the often separate phases of project planning and the integration of the built environment through

a joint decision-making and implementation process. We envision the festival centre as a reservoir of savoir-faire that supports the transformation of the environment with tact and acumen. Always in line with the themes of Tangente – ecology, memory and democracy.”

Local cooperation partners for the design and programme

of the festival centre include the permanent “residents” of the Löwinnenhof*: the association KulturhauptSTART, which was instrumental in initiating the process for the application for the European Capital of Culture 2024 and represents a central hub for St. Pölten’s independent scene; KUNST:WERK and the St. Pöltner Künstlerbund (St. Pölten artists’ association); NÖDOK -Dokumentationszentrum für moderne Kunst Niederösterreich (documentation center for modern art Lower Austria); Mars & Blum; the Master’s programme in Social Work at the FH St. Pölten; Haus der Frau St. Pölten (house of women St. Pölten); Büro für Diversität (office for diversity); St. Pride; Bühne im Hof; as well as numerous other local associations, initiatives and individuals.

Biennale Urbana

Biennale Urbana (BUrb) is an agency that explores and inhabits the existing distances between La Biennale (the cultural institution), Venice (the city) and its lagoon (the territory). Biennale Urbana finds inspiration from Documenta Urbana, a project realized by Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt in Kassel between 1980 and 1982, to experiment with the regeneration of abandoned and underutilized spaces of the city through the connection of artistic production with the real needs of the urban context, in an intertwining of art, architecture and urbanism.

Since 2014 the collective BUrb has been working on an educational programme and art pro­duction connecting formal institutions with informal and emer­ging realities based in Venice. Amongst them: “La CasaMare”, a project in collaboration with the New York design studios DSGNAGNC, Change Administration and Street Plans Collaborative for the US pavilion “Spontaneous Interventions“ at the 2012 Architecture Biennale; “How to Know: The Protocols and Pedagogy of National Abstraction”, performance, produced with the artist Pedro Lasch on the occasion of the Creative Time Summit for the Venice Biennale 2015; “Architectural Ethnography“ summerschool led by architect Momoyo Kaijima (Atelier Bow Wow) for the University of Queensland, the University of Tsukuba and ETH Zurich in collaboration with the Japanese pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale; “Beyond Repair”, the summerschool with Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts for the German pavilion at the 2019 Art Biennale.

Questioning the meaning of inhabiting abandoned spaces, at the end of 2016 BUrb started “Esperienza Pepe”, an extraordinary process of re-use of the former military barracks Pepe on the Lido of Venice, a place of convergence of all activities in a common action of urban regeneration through art, cultural and social production. In 2018, in collaboration with the French Pavilion at Venice Biennale,  BUrb created the conditions for a unique experience with a public program of events, workshops and art residency.  “Esperienza Pepe” has been a non-stop laboratory (2016–19) for the creation of community spaces and environments with self-constructed interventions and installations.

Since 2020 BUrb is collaborating with the municipality of Lavarone (Trentino, Italy) in reactivating underused spaces for promoting contemporary art and culture in a small mountain community, of hardly more than 1,000 inhabitants. BUrb has won a national competition in this context, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture, “Creative Living Lab”, with a project of participa­tory re-activation of a part of a former schoolas the location for a community centre and the new town museum. BUrb is also organising art residencies related to environmental art in an old villa of the town (Foresteria Culturale), previously used as home for self-sufficient seniors.

BUrb was founded in 2014 by Giulia Mazzorin, Lorenzo Romito und Andrea Curtoni. Since 2022 the collective heads the department raum&designstrategien at Kunstuniversität Linz.