20th-22nd of May 2022
preserve memories - provide energy International Art Festival in Berlin Second Edition
"preserve memories - provide energy" is an international art festival in Berlin created by three artists: Tetiana Kornieieva, Vincenzo Fiore Marrese and Sophia Moffa. The second edition will be in May 2022 at Liebig12 in Berlin.
Theme
shaping time
Different layers shape the Now, such as rituals, nature and industry, and during this layering, people face information overload, migrations, and wars. Nowadays, with the new development of the russo-Ukrainian War, we're keeping strong our artistic connection with Ukraine's art scene that joined us since the first edition of the Festival. We explore different layers such as rituals, nature and industry. These layers unveil the connection between the traditions and technologies, the untold languages of creatures that speak about us, and the challenge of global issues, with their presence or absence. Inside this frame of reference, artists will explore the stratigraphy of the Now.
Our story
preserve memories - provide energy, our story
We are three artists, Sophia, Tetiana and Vincenzo. We come from three different countries, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Italy, merging together in Germany. We met each other in Latvia and Bangladesh and once per year, we organize an art festival in Germany! Let us tell you the story.
Do you know what "performance art" is? It is this kind of art without artwork, without an object. The work is the action. Imagine that an artist takes a chair and sits on it. Then, the artist stands up. That could be a performance artwork. It sounds curious? It is, in a sense, but performance art is a well-developed form of art, for more than 50 years. And this is, of course, just a way to describe it: everything can change time after time.
Anyway, let's back to our story in Riga in 2018. At that time, Tetiana has presented a performance called "Transparency II". It was about indifference and empathy. Tetiana was outside on the street, with hands and legs covered in gypsum. Meanwhile, Vincenzo showed a performance called "Body's law". It was about the human body and its relationship between jail detention and society. He had some sensors connected to his body, creating electronic sounds related to his movements.
Some months later, at the beginning of 2019, Vincenzo performed the same piece in Bangladesh during a Biennale of performance art called "D'Lab | Dhaka Live Art Biennale" in Dhaka. Sophia was part of the biennale, too, as enne&moffa duo with a performance called "Memorandum of Understanding". The two artists were in a waiting room, on some chairs suspended in the air. In the words of enne&moffa, «The West is increasingly divided into those who have money but no time and those who have time but no money. The latter, with time, waits on the ones with capital. The wicked cycle of action-waiting-action and then being in a hurry to wait again. The atmosphere in the waiting room defines the note of the coming action (...)».
Then, in 2020, Vincenzo, coming from Florence, Italy, moved to Germany.
They kept in touch and started to plan the first edition of the Festival "preserve memories - provide energy" in Berlin. At that time, Sophia was in the UK, Tetiana in Ukraine and Vincenzo in Germany. So they started to plan the festival online through some collaborative software. It was before the pandemic. After the spread of the virus, this way of working increased in popularity. Then, due to the pandemic, the festival was postponed and, finally, took place in July 2021. The festival happened in a district of Berlin called Berlin-Lichtenberg. The venue was an old boiler room of 500 square meters and an adjacent theater with other artists and institutions.
Tetiana designed the festival logo, a gorgeous poster, a flyers and a graphic animation. We showed several artworks, two performances events, installations and video-art works. There was a guest artist too. Everything happened in the frame of an old boiler room, a museum of industrial heritage.
Now we are back. We are planning to create the second edition of our festival, "preserve memories - provide energy", in May 2022. It will be in another exciting venue: an artist-run space in Berlin, in the district of Berlin-Friedrichshain.