(Online)
Lahore Digital Arts Festival (LDF) is a biennial digital festival that aims to celebrate the emerging digital culture of Pakistan by bringing together a community of artists and audiences to explore the intersection of art, technology, and everything in-between. This edition, called Metaverse Bodies, is open from March 3 to 15 and explores the legal, ethical, commercial, philosophical, and existential implications of the metaverse, as well as the aesthetics and opportunities provided by such a reality, featuring around 60 artists.
Concerning the theme, the festival shared: “The further we move into the digital age, the more we seek to immerse ourselves. From the static experience of reading a webpage to now tricking our minds with augmented reality, we are full of science fiction visions of fully customizable simulated realities in which we live out our dreams and fantasies. What is our embodied experience of reality and how does it shape our bodies?”.
The Lahore Digital Arts Festival presents “Dreaming the Cities”, a project that aims to promote digital experiences that create bridges between artists and cities that otherwise will never meet through a co-designed process of 3 online encounters and a final meet with audiovisual performances. Through a series of meetings, the participants to know each other better, increase their knowledge about the other city’s cultural and creative context, how the other work and how the needs are met through innovation and creativity.
In this first edition, the project connected the millenary city of Lahore, Pakistan to the multicultural metropolis of São Paulo, Brazil. Three pairs of artists representing each city met throughout 4 sessions of dialogue and exchange of knowledge on creative modes and local cultures that allowed to creatively imagine and speculate possible urban futures and resulted in artistic performances presented to the public in a live session. “Dreaming The Cities Lahore x São Paulo” was produced by Linha 3 (BR), rearts (PK) with the support of DICE – Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies, British Council, and it features Jannat Ali, Novissimo Edgar, Romaisa Fawad, Coletivo Coletores, Koral Alvarenga, Amna Riaz.
Coletivo Coletores, one of PIPA Prize’s last year Awarded Artists, is participating with a mapped video projection in partnership with Romaisa Fawad. It is the result of a joint research between two different realities and at the same time consonant in the challenges for the construction of “Cities / Dreams”, based on stories that are built over many years of struggle and resistance.
Read below the text about the artwork:
“Among so many paths, collaboratively conceived in the network between São Paulo and Lahore, we looked for routes that would take us from the secular constructions of the temples and mosques to the surface spaces of the peripheries, towns and slums, of the webs that intertwine between the territories and their population.
This proposal highlights the territories from their fighters, daily warriors, in the relentless battle for dignity, education, representation and human rights that make their realities effective.
The territories of struggle are territories of resistance, of new subjectivities, of the creation of universal symbols that can be read in addition to languages, the signs of less imperative and more welcoming and inclusive cities.
For such a challenge, the objective is to occupy the city of São Paulo with images of eight references in the construction of more inclusive futures, either through intellectual production, or through tireless struggle in extremely unequal spaces.
The installation plans to print through the mapped video-projection the faces of prominent Afro-Brazilian feminists, who dedicated their lives to the fight for the rights of black women, through their voices and diverse activities. And likewise, it will have Pakistan’s most prominent feminist faces, who have defied and resisted violence against women, children and religious minorities, fighting fearlessly for their freedom.
The action takes place in Cidade Tiradentes on the east side of São Paulo, one of the most populous outskirts of the city. At the same time, it relies on the visuality also built in Lahore, composing a scene between cities based on the visuals.”
Watch below “Resistance Territories: Cities/Dreams” – Dreaming The Cities: Lahore x São Paulo:
Click here to visit the festival, and read about the second edition of the “Dreaming the Future” project (Lahore X Paris X Karachi) here.