The Festival 2015

The public sphere is a construct. It is the collective consciousness in which the beliefs of a society are constantly being renegotiated. The public sphere is the stage on which a society presents and represents itself. No other area is more intensely courted and contested.

The public sphere is a raw material. In recent decades, politics, advertising, entertainment, and business have increasingly refined their techniques for shaping this raw material. Messages are precisely placed and staged with the aim of taking a leading position in the competitive market of meanings. Facts and opinions, fiction and reality are often difficult to distinguish in this process. It's all about visibility.

This is where the documentary arts come into play. They draw attention to a specific section of reality, highlight it, reflect on it, and interpret it, making it accessible to the public. Personal biographies and subjective experiences are revealed, options are tested. The documentary often takes the form of a coming out. Coming out is counter-propaganda. 
What is reality?

From April 15 to 19, 2015, “It's the real thing – Basel Documentary Platform” offered a wide-ranging program of theater, performance art, exhibitions, and films by internationally renowned artists. There were experimental excursions into reality with young Swiss artists, as well as lectures, panel discussions, and workshops. All these diverse offerings focused on public space and reality not as something indisputably factual, but as a space of possible visibilities, self-expression, display, coming out, and self-empowerment.

Those who take the stage and tell their stories make them shareable. Those who speak transform. We will only understand the result in retrospect.