ALTOFEST 2016 - sixth edition TO GIVE RISE TO a Human / Urban requalification
INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL [deadline 21st May 2016]

Altofest is the space of the beginning, built by uncertain steps and persons waiting in front of the doors of the houses. Here, in Naples, where every moment is lived as the first time, the first sound, the first light. We care about falling in love. Here, where this is possible because nothing is as it seems, here, where no "seems" is known. Here you happen. Walking around the streets, here it may happen to see women wearing nightgowns while standing outside their “basso” (typical Neapolitan ground level house). They dominate a tiny plot of public land, showing their identity, that waters down with the one of their neighbour. This space sets the two inhabitants in and out their houses, at the same time. Naples moves the border of what is private or public not in front or behind. The border means inhabiting. A not physical border, but the result of inhabiting.

What we do with Altofest is creating a space for promiscuity in which everybody takes the risk of his own exposition to the other. What is private is not yours anymore, it becomes shared intimacy. Expropriation and displacement are usually felt as traumatic. During Altofest these feelings are like a storm where strangers are blocked under the same roof or in the same hall offering shelter from the rain.
We love saying that the festival is a trap you chose to fall into. It is a trap for the artist, chosing to leave the formal space. It is a trap for the space donor letting an artistic work live in his own intimacy. It is a trap for the audience that wil recognize the private space as something different, as a space where his sight will write and read something new.
The houses themselves become a white paper in the very moment the artists go beyond the doorstep. As inhabitants of the same place, both artists and citizens are totally and mutually exposed. No excuses for missing their encounter.
Alto Fest activates generative “dispositifs” of relation, thinking and knowledge, mixing public and intimacy. It creates a space of promiscuity in which artists and audience can go beyond their roles, participating in a total experience that generates “original relationships”.

Alto Fest emancipates itself from the function of mere “programming” and/or “production” of shows and artworks, as festivals are usually considered, to prefigure itself as a space for an experimental sociality.

In this way the city becomes the home for innovative and shared art practices, for artists who are “full of life” and brave citizens.

The festival was born in 2011 in Naples, and it is conceived and directed by TeatrInGestAzione.

TeatrInGestAzione cares for the artistic direction of the festival.
From many years the company deals with the creation of innovative artistic practices; directly involving international artists and territory, TeatrInGestAzione focuses on the involvement of citizens in the cultural processes, inserting the artistic action in the socio-urban and human architecture in which the company acts. They promote creative praxises that produce new thinking, fostering the growth of the community enhancing diversity, and not searching for consensus.

 THE DRAMATURGY OF A FEST
Alto Fest is an international project, generative and horizontal that is inserted in the innermost social-urban fabric by which it is hosted, in order “to give rise to”, a human and urban requalification. As artists and citizens we started from these questions: What makes us strangers to eachother? Where is the origin of the distance? Why is culture absent from the values and in the daily needs? We found in “PROXIMITY” and “GIFT” the keys to conceive the structure of ALTOFEST, relating the presence of the artist to the community his spectator belongs to, rather than the spectator as an individual.

In its past editions Alto Fest has created the space of proximity. Artists enter the donors’ houses; citizens welcome artworks in their everyday life, in their most intimate space, mutually re-writing their presence and urgency, giving rise to multiplied authentic relationships, creating a new possible community, a space for the plurality of action and thinking.

Alto Fest questions about the need to create new values, to radically reshape the relationship with the places, subverting the use of space and assignment of fixed roles, daring never tempted incursions (of discipline, responsibility, action).
Alto Fest is conceived as a live artwork, extended and shared. Its creators take care of the its building according to their own poetics and creative methods. According to the urgency to release the performing act from the exhibition context, re-defining the concept of scene as the space of an experimental sociality.

The artistic intervention is inserted in the urban and social architecture, preparing a space for sharing in which artists and authors from several disciplines have the possibility to question their processes and works, publically and collectively.

How the festival works

From the fifth edition, we added experts working in the field of culture (curators, producers), welcomed this year thanks to the support of the International Airport of Naples and to the dialogue with Creactivitas. The Festival is built with the citizens of Naples who host the works of international artists in their houses and/or private spaces (apartments, terraces, basements, courtyards, whole buildings, artisan shops…). 
The program of the festival welcomes all the expressions of contemporary art, hosting interdisciplinary projects, originated by the dialogue among artists experimenting with original synergies and hybrid praxis. Today their presence makes ALTO FEST a crossroads of diversified languages and experimental aesthetics. Works in program are observed and analyzed by a Critique Panel: a permanent space of reflection and interdisciplinary research, organic with Alto Fest, in which a miscellaneous group of researchers and artists is called to exercise a collective and multi-perspective look on the Festival. The Panel is directed by Silvia Mei (http://bit.ly/silviamei) in dialogue with TeatrInGestAzione. 

SENDING YOUR APPLICATION
Performers, researchers, art and thought practitioners, single or collective artists. Amateur groups are excluded. Selected artists can apply with ended works, to re-qualify their works in relation with the spaces of the festival, without technical supports that are not compatible with the assigned space. The works have to be finished and debuted. The Artistic Direction will compose the Program. The decisions of the Artistic Direction are unquestionable.