Infecting the City
A provocative, site-specific, public art festival that challenges the inner city of Cape Town.
Infecting the City (ITC) is an avant-garde public art festival, conceived to deliver provocative and novel site-specific performance art. It has been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited and staged in the public domain.
It is with plucky irreverence that ITC turns Cape Town's CBD into an edgy theatre venue to exhibit diverse, high quality, thought-provoking, boundary breaking works.
Infecting th City Gallery
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Infecting the City Video
The works developed for ITC enliven and invigorate the communal spaces of Cape Town and are free and accessible to the public. The Festival is a significant event both for the performing arts in South Africa and for Cape Town as a creative, iconic city. Audiences are asked to discover the hidden spaces and unexpected perspectives of the City.
The Festival programme is made up of a mixture of new collaborative works, specifically commissioned artworks, and invited works. Each year, the Festival addresses a specific social issue that in turn defines the nature of the Festival programme and artworks.
For the last three ITC Festivals, the collaborative projects have culminated in new performance pieces made by teams of artists from a variety of creative backgrounds. From a pool of submissions made by artists throughout the world, artists were selected to participate in a creative residency that included an intensive course on that year’s Festival theme and the time to conceptualise and create the public artwork. The course opened the residency attendees to the deeper layers and meanings of the theme in the Cape Town context. They also investigated the hidden stories, social dynamics and sites within the City.
The forth edition of ITC will take to the streets and public spaces of Cape Town from the 21st to the 26th of February 2011. Artists have been asked to respond to the theme of TREASURE, which encapsulates the vibrant and cosmopolitan diversity of Cape Town. The Festival will showcase the variety of cultural expressions that exist on the margins of society, what we consider waste, the people that make our City work, and the rich architectural heritage and natural wealth of the Cape.
For more information about the upcoming 2011 Festival, the Infecting The City project, and to access footage and the archive of the Festival performances visit: www.infectingthecity.com
