Buffer Fringe 2022 Creative Team

In an extraordinary collaboration with IMPACT (Imagining Together Platform for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation) / Brandeis University, the “Thinking Partners” program creates a system of artistic support and collective practice integral to the alignment of Buffer Fringe’s mission. The program started in 2020, with a  structure rooted in one-on-one consultation between individual thinking partners and Buffer Fringe artists. The thinking partners continued in 2021 with the same structure, offering essential guidance, fresh perspectives, and critical thought to the artists’ creative processes. 

For the 2022 edition of the Festival, the approach to the “Thinking Partners” program evolved to meet Buffer Fringe’s newly modified, increasingly collaborative structure. The Festival’s creative team and curators were joined by the International Community Arts Festival of Rotterdam (ICAF) and team members Jasmina Ibrahimovic, Anamaria Cruz, and Amy Gowen.

The innovative restructuring of the Buffer Fringe Festival’s curation initiated by the new methodological approach of “collaborative curation”, allowed for the ‘new’ Thinking Partners practice to be reimagined through  individually paired meetings, to a series of group discussions held between the ICAF collaborators, the BF creative team and the three curators/curatorial team.

The discussions allowed for collective exploration of curatorial motifs of audience reception and engagement, conflict transformation, and identity/community relative to BF2022’s overarching theme of Pockets/Cepler (ve ötesi). These online gatherings served as a thinking space in which the curators’ respective visions and significance of their spaces ultimately came together.

Thinking Partners – BF-ICAF- Report_V2

About ICAF: ICAF  is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global Hub network, and, every three years, an international festival that takes place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world.