Theatre | Performance | Dance | Film | Exhibition
It’s the real thing – Basel Documentary Platform 15
The public is a construct. It is the putative, collective consciousness within which the convictions of a society are consistently reinscribed. The public sphere is the stage on which a society presents and represents itself, and hence no social zone is more intensely courted and contested.
Publicness can also be understood as a sort of raw material. In the last few decades, politics, advertising, entertainment and economics have increasingly refined their techniques for shaping this raw material. Messages are precisely placed and staged with the aim of seizing a prominent position within the competitive marketplace of meanings. Fact and opinion, fiction and reality are often barely distinguishable in this process. The public sphere equals publicity; it's all about visibility.
This is where the documentary arts come into play.
Through performances, films and exhibitions, attention is directed to a particular slice of reality, which is accentuated, reflected upon and interpreted, and thereby made available to the public. Personal biographies and subjective experiences are disclosed, options diversified. Documentation thus goes hand in hand with the potential for transformation.
From 15 to 19 April, "It's the real thing – Basel Documentary Platform" will offer a wide-ranging program featuring documentary theatre, performance art, exhibitions and films by internationally acclaimed artists. There will be experimental excursions into reality with young Swiss artists, as well as lectures, panel discussions and workshops. All of these manifold offerings will focus on the public sphere and reality not as something incontestably factual, but rather as a space of possible visibilities, of self-representation, exhibition, comings-out, and self-empowerment. Those who take to the stage and narrate make their history shareable. Those who speak, transform.