B_Tour Festival is an international art festival of guided tours, initiated and developed by a young team from Berlin (led by Yael Sherill and Christin Prator) with the idea of establishing a festival which explores the format of guided tours as artistic strategy.
This year will be the festival’s second edition in Berlin, taking place between 8th and 10th of August 2014. It will be accompanied for the first time by a satellite festival in Belgrade, from 26th to 28th of September 2014, in partnership with 80|10, Belgrade based Art Production Company.
In each city, in the course of three days, about 15 tours will be presented by local and international groups of artists in several locations around the cities. The festival presents tours by up-and-coming young artists as well as established groups. The tours shown at the festival are a new hybrid form of public art that provide locals with a new perspective of their city and an opportunity to rediscover it and explore the politics of the public space, psychogeography, touring as an artistic strategy, gentrification, citizen’s social responsibility and more. B_Tour Festival invite groups and individuals to create tours that rethink storytelling, and suggest innovative, experimental approaches to the conventional format of a guided tour.
This year’s festival examines current needs of urban life and how art can be used as a tool to explore possible answers to these needs. They deal with civil participation in public space, urban life and its socio-historical context. The tours are lead either by the artists in person or the artists’ narrations in the form of audio tours, instruction guides/texts or maps. Artists are arriving from Europe, Russia, Israel and Australia to present variety of different approaches to this contemporary format of artistic practice.
B because it is not A; because it’s the alternative to the narrative of conventional tours.
B because it is a personal Biography of the community.
B because it is breaking the boundaries between public and private space.
The tours are accompanied by different side events such as artists and experts panels, exhibitions of materials produced on tours and examples of research work undertaken by the artists.
For more information about B_Tour Festival, visit www.b-tour.org
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Writer. Blogger. Traveler. Researcher. Electronic Music Lover.
