The Festivalization of Experience

Abstract

The digitization of information and its circulation in spiral through the Internet have radically transformed the working methods in museums, cultural practices and studies. Nowadays, visiting museums and art institutions demands the updating and resignification of the collection and the work of art in relation to visitors, rethinking the curatorship and its extension to digital media environments. In the displacement from the material object to the digital subject, curatorial practices adopt forms and codes where the festive seems to act as the ideal condition towards a new paradigm. This global process of festivalization of culture has been taking place since the mid-1990s in urban and neoliberal societies where leisure, consumption and extraordinary experiences are particularly relevant for the construction of individual identity and the generation of micro-communities. We could therefore ask ourselves what are the new, unknown requirements these practices ask for, what temporality demarcates them, and, especially, what relations do they establish with their publics. This text proposes French artist Anne Lise Le Gac’s project OKAY CONFIANCE as an open possibility against this phenomenom.