About
TV Free Europe is a Tele- Theatre Vision, an international collaboration encompassing the fields of performance and multimedia art, cultural heritage and art education.
What happened to the hopes of freedom after the end of the Cold War? What does free Europe mean today? What can liberate you at all in times of a global pandemic? And what’s up with the borders?
30 years after Radio Free Europe influenced and transmitted the Fall of the Iron Curtain, finally TV Free Europe is being launched! TV Free Europe explores the possibilities of freedom, especially the non-freedom of speech and the “freedom of market” by connecting voices, locations, times and stories, historical topics with today’s and tomorrow’s facts and fictions.
The format of television becomes a horizontal medium which creates immediate platforms of exchange. Sender and receiver mix up (as Bertolt Brecht suggested in his radio theory) and people of different walks of life step up and connect over personal issues of freedom and change.
The project provides an experiment, a play and an experience of “making TV” together. A series of practical research actions with performative and multimedia tools, public video shootings involve people with and without/not yet lived experience of the System Change. TV Free Europe is performance, TV, common game, artistic research, exchange of thoughts and in the end a liberation experiment.
What happens in TV Free Europe
Six local studios have been formed — the TV Free Europe network has been launched.
In 2020/21 we have elaborated common artistic research methods, and organised decentralised and interconnected events.
Due to the Covid19 situation our physical activities have been drastically limited, including the meetings between project partners and participants.
In order to respond to this situation we have launched a platform of communication and mutual learning:
TV Free Europe – an experimental TV channel running here: https://tv-free-europe.eu/live
For 2021 a series of public events are scheduled to take place online, offline or in hybrid formats.
Locations
Budapest, Szombathely (HU), Leipzig (DE), Tårnby Torv – Copenhagen (DK), Oberwart (AT), Nova Gorica (SLO) and on air inbetween East and West, North and South
Partners
Pneuma Szöv. (HU), KÖME – Association of Cultural Heritage Managers (HU), OHO – Offenes Haus Oberwart (AT), University Nova Gorica (SL), UT Connewitz (Leipzig / DE), Tårnby Park Studio (DK), Mari&Marie, Pneuma Vizuál, BOHÉM Klub, ELTE Savaria University Centre – Department of Visual Arts, (HU) Szombathely Arts High School (HU)
Supporters
Co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, with the support of Allianz Kulturstiftung and the U.S. Embassy of Budapest, Széchenyi 2020 European Social Fund
Mission
1989 – the year when the Iron Curtain fell. Borders dissolved. Hope was in the air. What is today in the air? Thinking about freedom, what did happen to that promise? And what is freedom anyway?
We are looking for freedom: being a “free” artist on the “free” market? Everybody an agent: not for Stasi but for themselves as a product? Creating art that channels between us – not exactly Radio Free Europe but in an enhanced way: TV Free Europe!
TV Free Europe is a mix of theatre, performance, public art, university classes, street interventions, life, thinking about own work structures, video art and first of all: artistic research. On the way, inspiring sites and stories connected to 1989 are being revisited. What about forgotten East underground culture? What about free media trials and new forms of communities during the -so called- system change? What can be used from them today?
Europe’s borders today seem to be as tight as the pixel system on the screens. Where to escape through the fence and where are we going?
TV Free Europe is a medium that asks questions and tries in itself to create worthwhile living and working structures. It includes open process and failure. It sends messages from the future and broadcasts the past live now in your personal TV. Everybody is their own, individual TV. We happily dig out our old clichés about TV living rooms and create a common “TV” making and “TV” watching -> The Network -> the (former) mainstream media clashes with our nowadays imaginations and realities.
Fail the system and follow the wild.
Jasna Hribernik (University Nova Gorica) on TV Free Europe