Image courtesy of Sydelle Willow Smith/ICA
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is calling for proposals to be presented at this year’s Infecting The City Public Arts Festival which will be held from 8 November to 19 November 2023.
Infecting the City (ITC), South Africa’s longest-running public art festival, pulls performance and visual art out of theatres and galleries and into the streets and public spaces of Cape Town. ITC reimagines public space as a stage, displaying a variety of art forms and providing a platform for artworks that are meaningful to the people who inhabit these areas. Beyond light entertainment, the festival challenges the audience, transcends aesthetic and disciplinary lines, and shifts perceptions.
Infecting The City Public Arts Festival unfolds across the streets and several other public areas of Cape Town’s Central Business District. It offers an uncommon chance for art, music, dance, and performance to engage with or disrupt Cape Town’s daily activities beyond theatres and galleries.
The theme for the 2023 ITC is political and social activism. The festival will present works that address the most urgent problems facing South Africa right now, recognising the urgency of social, political, and economic transformation.
Artists may apply for one or both of the following categories:
The first category is ‘Activism’ and it is a call for practitioners whose work raises awareness or advocates for a specific cause and community-based organisations who are interested in collaborating with artists to create a public artwork – a performance, an installation, or a happening. It is open to performance artists, visual artists, and writers.
The objectives include providing a platform to support activist work through artistic interventions and promoting dialogue and partnership between artist-activist, community-based groups, cultural groups, and the general public. The second category, which has been tagged ‘New or Restaged Public Artworks’ is a call for established and emerging artists to submit proposals to present innovative, new site-specific works or to restage an existing work. The proposal can be for a full ensemble piece, an intervention, a live performance, a visual art piece, an installation, a video, a happening, working with technology, via social media, an interactive work, or some other form newly imagined.
All works should be situated in, or interact with, a public environment, and should actively engage intentional and incidental audiences in compelling ways. Focus on public participation and audience involvement is strongly recommended.
Successful applications will receive financial and technical support.
Applicants should submit a single PDF file containing the following:
- Name, email address, and contact telephone numbers.
- A concept document of no more than 1 page outlining the proposed creative artwork (including images)
- If the work has been performed before, please include links to access the work.
- Full Curriculum Vitae of artist/s, company or organization.
- Budget, indicating clearly which part of the budget would need monetary support from the ICA.
This single PDF file should be sent to ica@uct.ac.za with the subject line: ITC 2023 Proposal.
For more information on how to apply, find here.
Application closes on 30 June 2023.
