Centre Cultural la Mercè, Girona

6th - 8th March 2008

We celebrated the fifth anniversary of the festival and for this reason twelve International artists were selected to participate, some of whom had already taken part in the last four editions. We chose Synergy as the title for this event, not to restrict the artists in their way of working but to provide a context within which to evaluate and appreciate the live art works. Synergy is from the Greek word synergos, συνεργός meaning working together. Normally used as a scientific term it describes a mutually advantageous conjunction where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. This is a dynamic state in which combined action is favoured over the sum of individual component actions. Essentially performance or live art work can be described as an act of synergy, depending equally on the presence of the artist and the presence of the viewer. We can understand the live art work as a shared active and organic experience, which allows the mysterious transformation of simple, perhaps even banal actions into meaningful and powerful symbols that transmit a deeper reality and truth.Through these works there can be a breaking down of restricting mental structures in order to free true experience and logic.The need for this type of mutual experience is essential to our times. The artist dives into the Collective Unconscious to retrieve and reassemble the valuable dregs of our culture from the depths, collecting the rubble of human experience that we throw overboard in our struggle for material survival thus impoverishing our spiritual lives. Synergy occurs when the viewer is pulled down below the surface by the force of the artist's creativity and thereby shares and contributes in the resulting experience.