festival
Stateless Mind is an interdisciplinary artist platform founded by the association Jambatan. The first Stateless Mind Festival was held in Copenhagen in 2019 and has since become an annual event with a growing interest and larger participation from both artists and audiences.
Stateless Mind specializes in interdisciplinary audience engagement collaborating with museums, art institutions, schools, and organizations creating a platform for artists to share their works through dialogs, archival, pedagogy, and the development of imaginative and investigative exhibitions in Denmark and Internationally. Future plans include working with artists that are experimenting with new media forms to reach an even broader audience.
Jambatan has hosted and coordinated four Stateless Mind performance art festivals and forums since 2019, both in Copenhagen and at the Venice Biennale. Stateless Mind works within the themes; migration, displacement, memories, and decolonization based on overall factors such as imperialism and global economic segregation impervious to the hierarchization of humanity into a racial or cultural center. It focuses on the diaspora and minority community regardless of their ethnicity, race, religion or sexual orientation in a so-called ‘world divided into compartments; where we see growing inequalities between home and belonging and traditions and new norms.
Theme of the festival
Stateless Mind #5 - Calling it Home focuses on the concepts of home, materially and metaphorically in relation to the given environment and surroundings. It brings together artistic practices that explore the idea of home as an ideal place, identity, and a sense of belonging. For some people home is a house, connected to a particular place. For others, it is the city- or landscape, the color of the sky, or a sense of belonging to a certain group of people or community who shares the same values, beliefs, or way of life.
The festival will feature around 20 artists with different backgrounds in Scandinavia, Asia and USA. The majority of them are based in Europe as migrants. The participating artists are invited to create works in response to their exploration and experiences of the hybridity that exist in a multicultural society. They will create performances that reflect and investigate the concept of home, while contributing to a Nordic attribution on cultural diversity and potentially reclaiming their own history and narratives in response to dominant discourses.
Stateless Mind #5 - Calling it Home seeks to contribute to a bigger public awareness of the work of intercultural artists. It offers nuances about what home means and adds to the dialogue of the global movements or migration.
It wishes to stimulate an interest in art, that enables a transnational connectedness between people in the local communities and internationally concerning the multi-cultural society we are living in. Diaspora refers to a group of people living outside their ancestral homeland, and in the context of this festival, it pertains to artists who discuss and respond to their exploration and experiences of hybridity resulting from multiple cultural heritages.
The festival aims to raise public awareness about the work of performance artists and artists of diaspora, offering nuanced perspectives on the concept of home and contributing to the global dialogue on diaspora movements. Diaspora individuals often navigate the complexities of their intertwined cultural identities in the northern context, and this festival seeks to stimulate an interest in art that promotes transnational connectedness among local and international communities, especially in the context of our multicultural society.
It is our hope that the festival also will reach new audience groups, and create opportunity for new network and cooperation.
Bettina Fung
