12 Feb 2008 5:30pm - 6:30pm CRASSH

Description

Trevor Davies (Director, Copenhagen International Theater; international arts consultant and programmer)

ABSTRACT
I would like to look at the way temporary events and festivals can be used to alter the status quo and to generate a process of chage in a community. All too often, festivals are seen as items of entertainment and attraction – as part of the celebrated creative economy. Although this may be true to a certain extent, their longer term perspectives and potential are often ignored or simply not understood.

 
 

 

After launching a series of arts festivals over 25 years of practice, Trevor Davies has just launched, in 2007, a new initiative 'Metropolis' which will try to question our current understanding and planning of cities.

 

This biennale has a 10 year life span ahead of it. The project will in particular look at peripheral sites, coss over arts practice, inclusive processes and social sculptures in an attempt to find alternative strategies in the urban environment and in particular in the public domian.

 

Metropolis has already attracted many artists, architects and urban activists and thinkers, and the biennale is also engaged in mapping exercises for communities in the city of Copenhagen. Metropolis  will also provide a platform for the practice of  “cultural acupuncture” with aims at working with processes, movements, feelings, thoughts, memories and energies of cities.”

 

BIOGRAPHY
Trevor Davies is educated as a planner / architect in Nottingham in 1972 and in 1974 he relocated to Denmark. Since that date he has worked at the interface of the arts and the city. He has managed 7 national and international arts organisations, specialising in festivals and large scale projects, having produced and curated more than 40 major festivals, He was also responsable for directing Copenhagen 1996 Cultural Capital of Europe. He has a vast experience of  “eventmaking”  which also acts as  “citymaking”.


 

 

 With this seminar series  Cambridge City Seminar wishes to encourage discussions that dovetail questions concerning the urban environment, and the ways in which it is culturally constructed and represented. These questions include the political and aesthetic investments in the built environment, the city as a setting for social practices, as well as the representation of the urban in film, visual arts, digital media and literature.

 

 All welcome. No registration required.

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