Buffer Fringe 2022 Theme

BFPAF 2022 Theme  – Pockets (beyond)

Buffer Fringe 2022 theme aimed to initiate a discussion on who is visible/invisible and why. Pockets (beyond) became a space to start thinking about difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. It transfered agency back to the marginal, the forgotten, the invisible.

Pocket in question is a pocket of resistance against the inhumanity of the new world order and a place where we keep things we need or love: pockets contain and hide things, yet they also keep them close to us. What pockets contain may also be traces and remnants of the past that stay alive in the stitches that keep the pocket together. In that sense, a pocket may look like a blind spot but blind spots resist the logic of the main frame and go beyond expected ways of seeing.

Beyond implies a disturbance of direction, a restless movement. Beyond promises the future and yet acknowledges a sense of disorientation brought by the precarity of our times.

In Buffer Fringe 2022, beyond became pocket of curiosity and imagination and asked:

• Will there be a place for me to live and to create?
• Can a pocket become an alternative space to live and to create?
• What is beyond our blind spots?
• How can artists puncture dominant notions of culture, race, sexuality and environmental and human crises?
• How could everyday life and art intersect?
• What power do we have to ask these questions?