This year’s Cappadox Festival looks to be the best yet, revolving around the theme of “Ways Out From The World”, and set in stunning Cappadocia from Thursday 18 through Sunday 21 May. The festival has a diverse program, blending music, contemporary art, gastronomy and outdoor activities together. Rhye, Yasmine Hamdan, Acid Pauli, AH! KOSMOS, Kalben, Oceanvs Orientalis, Emma Shapplin, and Peter Broderick are just a few of the names performing at this year’s festival. Contemporary art plays its part with geology tours, flora walks, and opportunities to interact with curators and artists. Tastings, open fire cooking, picnics, silent walks, cycling, running, yoga, meditation and more also all make their appearances. For practical info on attending this year, check out their useful guide. A variety of packages and ticketing options are available via Biletix.
From the organizer:
Ongoing wars… mass migrations… discontent with the current systems and governances… global environmental warnings… endless protests… We are going through such times that the present has never become more undecipherable. Caught up in complex webs of conspiracy theories, inexhaustible causal relationships, uninterrupted flow of signs and data, our ways of knowing and understanding the World have been dramatically failing. It gets even more difficult to anticipate anything other than disquieting ambiguity. From where we stand, there seems almost no hope, no possible way out. As the World is getting smaller, many of us feel locked up in time to bear with what is going on.
The “Ways Out From The World” is a quotation from the author, the poet and the artist Sami Baydar’s book of the same title from 1990. “Only the children who are locked up in the rooms know the ways out from the world,” writes Baydar in his fragmentary narrative, intensifying the relations between poetry, story and theatrical play. In despairing circumstances of impossibility and impotence of action, Baydar proposes the poetic act –Act of making meaning / making the World- as a vigorous enactment of emancipation, directly referencing to the realm of imaginary, the ways that art can open up.
Today, the already existing theories, formulas, strategies or tactics fall short of capacity to ignite substantial change. Informed by the urgency of undoing the ways we know, we need to imagine and invent unprecedented ‘languages’ to conceive the world-to-come. As opposed to the naked reality as factuality, “Ways Out From The World” intends to conjure up desires for what has not yet emerged, not yet been visible and has yet to come.
In this sense, art can propose novel languages, creative forms, unorthodox methods and practices to open up the imaginary. The contemporary art programme of Cappadox 2017 curated by Fulya Erdemci and Kevser Güler (Associate Curator) will explore the distinct ways of poetic act, ‘making the world’ in the heart of the inspiring and complex geography of Cappadocia and Anatolia between the 18th of May and the 11th of June 2017. International artists and collaborators with site-specific and context-responsive new productions will participate in the program. Excavating their unique ways out from the world, the invited artists will bring out proposals which encompass issues like voicing the possibility of an equalitarian companionship with other species on Earth, or introducing a new planet to move into.
All in all, “Ways Out From The World” does not refer to the escapist strategies, but it is rather an invitation to get as courageous as the imagination goes.
*Cappadox is a Pozitif experience.
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For more information check out the official site for Cappadox Festival. You can also follow them via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
All images courtesy of the organizer.
