Linha de Fuga brings together 28 national and international artists, 17 of whom were selected by international call with a work in progress or with an action proposal to offer to the inhabitants of the city. Among them there are two whose function is to document the entire laboratory and its practices from a subjective and critical perspective and whose intention is to give back to society a way of documenting the ephemeral and practices of knowledge transmission. 11 artists were invited to run workshops and present performances, some developed in conjunction with the selected artists and the local population, resulting in the festival programme.

Designed as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, according to Hakim Bey’s ideas, LINHA DE FUGA will have moments of collective work where participants can exchange and work on their artistic projects in relation to other practices; and individual work periods, where each participant defines the most appropriate way to occupy the time available: in collaboration with other participants, in individual feedback with invited artists or in the development of their individual research.

DEMOCRACY

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In this edition we want to rethink the concept of democracy, considering the current political trends in the world and, especially after COVID-19, due to which democracy has been put on hold in many countries.

A democratic society is a society that must consider difference and that does not regulate social life by a defined majority, as such; it must respect the anonymous, the excluded and the unnamed minority. However, and as argued by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil, “fear prevents certain forces from expressing themselves, inhibits, removes and separates the individual from their territory, retracts the space of the body, shatters group cohesions – all with mediate and immediate effects in the processes of economic, social, artistic and thought production.” In the territories 'classified' as peripheral, this situation is more evident when the construction of the image of the self is extremely important for the individual and, therefore, where the social pressure of fitting into a hegemonic majority makes us forget the importance of thinking about the common space, which belongs to everyone.


Thus, we propose to think about the importance of anonymity, giving up the ego, centralism, protagonism. Our proposal is to think about the importance of public space for the construction of the pro-common: the space of democracy. What do we do as citizens to reduce the inequalities of a democracy? What can artists do? Our challenge is to answer these questions throughout the laboratory and festival.

The concept of democracy can be worn out by the social, economic and cultural vices of the world in which we live; we are aware that it is necessary to rethink society and the way we all live and care for each other, but democracy is also the foundation of all our freedom and of all our possibility to grow as individuals.




To the participating artists, we launched the first challenge and we asked them to answer without fear and without filters.
Each answer, being entirely their responsibility, is free from censorship and is the expression of each one's freedom.