little islands festival 2024

Little Islands Festival (LIF) is preparing for its new journey and is looking for creators with original ideas that recreate and invent compelling narratives, shared experiences and new worlds. This open call has a direct connection with the research project Homo Narrans implemented with the support of EFFEA “discovery” 2023.

For about 8 months the project offered the ground for emerging artists to engage in a creative dialogue with people from the Balkan and Mediterranean regions, highlighting local narratives and new artistic projects based on filmmaking, new media, sound, video and photography.

LIF 2024 expands upon this topic to create an enriched platform for exchange and dialogue that places narrative within the community and simultaneously takes it out of it, stirring up new and multiple realities that play with difference but oppose erasure.

Festival Identity: Outdoor – dialogues with the public space -intimate dialogue between humans, natural landscapes and cultural heritage

Assuming the world is a set of events signified by words, man’s access to it becomes primordially oral, eliciting the idea not of Homo Sapiens but of Homo Narrans, that “narrative animal” with an irrepressible tendency and need to communicate, interpret and symbolize the world through its stories. Myths, legends, antiquities, folktales, novels, epics, paintings, and more recently, films, interactive books, video games, interactive narratives, from everyday narrations to scientific theories and the hegemonic narratives through which societies define themselves, man has sought to conjure up fear and time, to transcend anxiety and the unpredictable, to give his life meaning, purpose and intention, to inhabit the world with anthropomorphic actors, to understand it and sometimes to deconstruct it.

The new LIF 2024 open call, taking the mythical landscape of Aegean Sea as its inspiration and contemporary art as its medium, seeks to highlight works that unravel the thread of narrative through the past and the future, the visible and the occult, the local and the supra-local, the traditional and the mythical, the natural and the cultural. What narratives are we in need of to reconnect today?