Art as a meeting ground for stories, generations, and the land.
At a time when many traditions have been flattened or forgotten, Contemporary Rituals invites artists and communities in Europe and North Africa to revisit inherited practices ; not to preserve them unchanged, but to engage them as living material. Across generations and geographies, the project explores how stories, gestures, and gatherings can help us sense what matters now.
Intentions
- To reconnect with the deep intentions of past generations linked to the living world, and to question their place in the stories we need to create in the present.
- To shape shareable gestures rooted in today’s contexts, without exoticism or reenactment.
- To listen for what remains alive beneath the surface across eras in our relationship to different forms of life.
Format
A transnational artistic research and creation project, with artistic direction by ce-ci.
This project supports artists in creating participatory spaces where communities revisit past practices and make sense of the present. Here, rituals are not the goal, but a vessel: a way to re-story our relationships - with each other, with place, and with what sustains us.
Means activated
- Recruiting international artists, diaspora artists, and local artists
- Experimenting with unconventional intergenerational transmission formats
- Hybrid forms blending art, memory, and new imaginaries
- Interdisciplinary documentation of the process to compare radically different modes of capturing an experiment
- Detection and documentation of spatial, temporal and perceptive interstices: past, present, future, Europe, North Africa, diaspora, rural, urban, intergenerational transmission, human, non-human, and different ways of knowing.
Partners
Pro Progressione (Budapest), B7L9 / Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunis),
European Union (in progress).
Photo credit: Charlotte Hochman