Manifesto

We research what it means to be human

Festa Kraftverk is a place of research into what it means to be human.

We look for it through unexpected lenses: artistic practice, conversation, music, the land, and the ordinary work of living together. We make because making is human. No single work carries the whole answer. Collectively, over the years, the picture sharpens.

We believe art is made in relations. Between each other, between us and the land we live on, inside each of us and outside of us. The residency is an invitation to research those relations through your own practice, and through practices that are not yet yours.

We cohabitate in a power plant

An old power plant on the outskirts of Oppdal. Secluded from modern societal processes, yet in materiality reminiscent of them; a concrete building, erected for the sake of electricity.

The silence here gives us space to think. The absence of the usual responsibilities gives us space to reflect. These are the conditions the work grows in.

We feel invited by the building. Around it is a landscape that gives power to us, and still most of us choose to gather around the man-made structures built to serve us. Now we serve it. This building took energy from the water and gave it to people. We give it ours back.

Energy is never lost, only converted

The first law of thermodynamics states that no energy is lost, only converted. This place was made to turn falling water into electricity. It still converts energy now, just in a different form. As residents we put energy in by cohabitating and through our practices, and none of it is lost in the process: it returns to us as purpose, and to the people around the power station as a reason to come in.

We work in open space

Open space is the industrial hall and the arena outside. It is also the open mindspace we ask of you. Even inside your own project you stand susceptible to discussion and reflection.

Be available to one another. Discuss, reflect, exchange, critique.

This is a production residency, so we encourage you to follow a work from beginning to end within the season. It is not a requirement. There is permission to fail here, and a failed work is as interesting an outcome as a polished one. Build the schedule your practice needs, not the one you are used to.

We live as a small society

Not a community held together by what its members have in common, but a society held together by each individual's unique addition: a building, a river, a season, a kitchen. A multitude of disciplines keeps us open. Each resident is free to look for what their practice needs at that moment, and free to ask the others for it.

We share a food budget, our meals and our household tasks, and that sharing makes something level between us. A meal is fleeting, and its impact ripples far beyond the table. We hope these quiet moments become the bond in which differences of opinion and personality are held in trust.

We reject discrimination and hateful acts. This place is built on trust and understanding, and the diversity of ideas and characters inside it is the thing we are most proud of. Keep an open mind in conversation and in feedback. One person's freedom should never diminish another's.

We make things that leave the building

The exhibition is not necessarily a display of finished objects. It is a spatial and social event, a room where our questions are made public and where the residency, the village and whoever is passing through end up standing in the same space.

For Festafest, we create the environment the festival happens inside of. Scenography, installations, interventions: preferably work that is finished only when people move through it, inhabit it and dance in it. Art here is not looked at from a distance. It is entered.

Some of what we build can stay. Structures between architecture and art, made to be inhabited, that become part of the plant and are altered by the residents who come after. Every season leaves a layer. The building keeps converting. But this is completely up to the artists themselves; they decide what happens to their own creation.

The doors stay open

The current runs both ways.

We bring new people, ideas, conversations and events into a small place, and Oppdal returns its landscape, its history, its winters and its knowledge to our work. Some of what is ordinary to the people here is extremely valuable to us. Some of what we make gives them a reason to walk in.

We want the relationships and ideas made in a season to outlast the season.

A place that closes its doors converts nothing.

We continue to evolve

The residency is an ongoing experiment. Every year we look again at what we made, how we lived, what we gave to Oppdal and what it gave us. Every year we read this text again and change what has stopped being true.

This place needs energy to convert.

That is why we are here.