Letting the Days Go By: WEDNESDAY PROGRAM

Index Teen Advisory Board: INTO THE BLUE AGAIN
Wed 20 June, 18:00-20:00

Join us for the farewell presentation by the current Index Teen Advisory Board members Désirée Bayibsa, Emmanuel Angelos Zavalis, Mikaela Wei, Viola Flø Brøther, Moa Lundborg and Björn Hjelm. Taking over the Index office with artistic interventions, describing some of the processes and conversations held throughout the year together.

The Index Teen Advisory Board (ITAB) offers eight paid positions for young people ages 16–20 every year. The aim is to bring together a group of young people with differing cultural backgrounds, languages and life experiences and reflect together on the role and potential of culture today, and implement ideas into the agenda of the organization. Meeting once a month, the board actively supports decision making and evaluation, and also participate in organizing events targeted at a young audience. In our meetings, we bring the board in close contact with our exhibiting artists, members of our organization and other cultural institutions, through a series of workshops, visits, and other activities.

Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea: GIVE ME HELL – ACCIDENTAL DANTE
Wed 20 June, 19:00-21:00, performance starts 20:00

Welcome to the closing night of the festival, featuring the performance Give Me Hell: Accidental Dante by Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea with stand-up by Ami Kohara, Megan Francis Sullivan, Maija Timonen, Sara Wolfert and Nathalie Wuerth.

The retraining program aimed at making artists more useful to society has failed. They are now being sent straight to Inferno. Having misinterpreted it as a residency one of the artists has rewritten the ending of Dante’s original text as a project. The now popular song is making a mockery of Dante and the old order. Fearing an uprising, Beatrice – the chief muse – sends Virgil to the outer world to seek help from the artist’s friend, who is given the task to find her and bring her back. This Accidental Dante will have to ask the female characters in Dante´s Inferno for directions. Cast as humiliating representations, despite having occupied significant power in real life, these characters rely on stand-up to deal with their situation. How will Accidental Dante deal with the thin threads holding together this poetic construction?

Ami Kohara Cleopatra
Francesca Lacatena Thais
Maija Timonen harpy and Dido
Nathalie Wuerth Medusa
Megan Francis Sullivan Beatrice
Sara Wolfert Sara
Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea Accidental Dante

Give Me Hell is a performance series by Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea wherein commissioned and partly improvised parts meet scripted material. Its first chapter premiered in 2016 in Berlin with the following predicament:

As part of a new cultural self-reinvention project set in a near future, nine artists have been rounded up to be retrained into the more serviceable civic activity of performing stand up entertainment. This will be their first public appearance. Art is no longer administered by middlemen, but governed directly by the top political figurehead. Each performer will compete against each other, with Angela Merkel as the absolute juror. This is still unknown to the performers.

A double of Angela Merkel elected the winner, who was crowned and awarded a descent into hell. This is where the misunderstanding and the second chapter begins.

Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea is an artist based in Berlin and Stockholm. Her work often contains foreign elements or actors, who are assigned roles or tasks to perform within each piece. These cast intruders become messengers from a different context, whose presence destabilises the overall language. It is in this duality between the borrowed and scripted material, the various interests of each party when facing their respective audience, that the piece is negotiated. Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea’s work has been shown at Acud Berlin, Studio 17 Stavanger, Brandts Konsthall Odense, Index Stockholm, Spektrum Berlin, Romanian Cultural Institute Stockholm and Signal Malmö.

Give Me Hell is made with support from Kulturkontakt Nord