Charizard

The Imaginary Festivals Project (IFP) was a playful, stupid and intensely laborious contribution to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, hosted by the Forest Fringe. It was comprised to two main elements: a fictional programme and review sheet.

The festival programme detailed the operations of the fictional venue (‘IF Venues’) for the entire festival. Printed and distributed throughout the festival, it was replete with listings, introductory notes from the curatorial team, maps, timings and schedules, etc. The programme was full of bad jokes and clip art; and was a repository for all the impossible work we wanted to make and see.

The review sheet (‘INFO’) was written and printed each day while in residence at the Forest Fringe. These reviews were co-authored with visitors the space. It became a vehicle to satirise and critique conventions and economies of the festival – including hyperbolic claims made by the mass of reviews across the festival – as well as imaginng utopic alternatives.

IFP was inspired by a mantra within arts marketing: “the performance starts when you first hear about it, and ends when you stop thinking about it.” We were also inspired by legacies of Fluxus and conceptual art in which ideas and textural descriptions of artwork became highlighted as significant materials in their own right.

Our interests in this project can be seen throughout our work: over-production, works that are basically one-liners, aesthetics of administration, the promise of artistic encounter, and an attempt to reveal and critique the conditions which invisibly shape how art is produced and presented.

Publication and installation: Presented at Forest Fringe, The Drill Hall (Edinburgh, August 2014).

IF Venues programme: download here.

Preliminary workshops at The Yard Theatre.