HAPPENING!

Festival of performative arts, installations and performances

Conceived and curated by Letizia Renzini / Produced by NAM – Not A Museum

“Humanity, nature, perception, culture, relationships, the essential factors in the reopening of this society based on the individual are ones that are collective, and not vice versa.”

Happening! looks into the relationship between the performing arts and performance by giving them new creative scenarios, following a flexible and osmotic production concept that merges and combines artistic disciplines, forming bonds between the artists and between the artists and the public, in a continuous dialogue with its surroundings.

Installations, performances, concerts, artworks, exhibitions, and all of their possible crossovers will bring life to Manifattura Tabacchi, creating a vibrant and lively environment in continual movement, a workshop for the arts involving the viewer in a process of creative participation, a meta-composition using the spaces, the various artistic disciplines, the creators, and the viewers as its palette.

The events programme, marked out by its hybridisation of video, dance, music and performance, has ben designed in a way that allows the viewer to plot their own course through its various elements, thanks to the repetition of some of these performances.

The festival will bring together artists from all over the world in the spaces at Manifattura Tabacchi, such as artist and composer Jessie Marino from New York, American trumpet player, visual artist and performer Rob Mazurek, visual and sound artist and performer Letizia Renzini, Marina Giovannini with an original, expansive and participatory version of the performance Meditation on Beauty, Silvia Franco in Opera Lab, as well as Italian-Eritrean artist, performer and director Muna Mussie.

GALLERY

ph. Giovanni Savi

Within the festival, the experimental label OOH-sounds will curate a series of electronic music performances including Shelley Parker / Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome‘s LET THE BODY project, Nicola Ratti in an unprecedented collaboration with Muna Mussie and live sets by Giuseppe Ielasi, Bellows and Holy Similaun.

In addition, Happening! will also involve many different local organisations in the project, including the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, Tempo Reale, The New Generation Festival, the CAB008 association, Attivisti della danza and Fondazione Studio Marangoni. Luisa Zuffo – a collaborator of artistic director Letizia Renzini, and NAM – Not a Museum have been working together with the creative community at Manifattura Tabacchi to put on the festival, in particular with the architects of q-bic studio and some of the makers from B9 such as mòno, Canificio and Duccio Maria Gambi, participating in the conception and construction of design elements and site-specific scenery.

FULL PROGRAM

Happening!
Curated by Letizia Renzini
Produced by NAM – Not A Museum,
Manifattura Tabacchi’s contemporary art program
With thanks to:
Avuelle, Canificio, Duccio Maria Gambi, Fondazione CR Firenze,
Fondazione Studio Marangoni, Fosca, I Balzini Winery, mòno,
Music Norway, OOH-sounds, New Generation Festival,
Scuola Musica di Fiesole, Tempo Reale, Ultima Festival Oslo, Zooteatro.