The expression “To Make a Long Story Short” means getting directly to the important part of a narrative, leaving out unimportant or boring details and what may seem irrelevant information.
In a nutshell, it means choosing which version of the story to convey.
As backbone of this festival’s edition, “LONG STORY SHORT” moves on this misunderstanding.
Found in the slippery space between the History with a capital letter – official, contracted, mediated – and the plurality of the tiny stories, that are often times considered irrelevant. Yet, plural narratives could have produced plural futures. Futures that we cannot imagine today.
“A story exists only when it’s told” and all untold stories are part of repressed possibilities. Erasing, removing, forgetting some stories prevents us from experimenting with alternative paths of development of a human, political and social nature.
What if these stories could be told again? Could they become a form of public expression?
This is the purpose which brings together all the artistic performances that will take place in the more than 10 days of this edition of FAROUT.
This year we bring to FAROUT projects that are acts of resistance and liberation from standards and paradigms, from what is culturally and historically accepted.
We do this through the body, the generative ability of the word, the (im)possible dialogue between worlds in conflict. We listen to generational reactions to the collapse of ideologies. We free the representation of sexuality from patriarchal dynamics.
From the meeting of these proposals develop the paths that the public can choose to undertake, to the discovery of a plural voice of history.
The aesthetics of FAROUT 2023 also accompany us in this narration. Words become images and distort, deform, lose meaning (or find a new one). As in the performances of the festival we research and tell the omitted, denied, rewritten, evoked words, as well in the treatment of the phrase How to do things with words (J.L. Austin, 1962), the author guides through the discovery of the linguistic act, which does not limit to describe, but is capable of producing imagination and changes, new worlds.
Linda Di Pietro, Creative Director, BASE Milano