TV FREE EUROPE

TV Free Europe is a Tele- Theatre Vision, an international collaboration encompassing the fields of performance and multimedia art, cultural heritage and art education. Running between 2019 and 2021, TVFE was one of KÖME’s projects bringing together art and heritage interpretation, exaining how they can complement and support each other.

One of the main demands of active citizens in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was the right for information and a democratic public sphere. Today we face a narrowing and disintegrating public sphere with increasing restrictions on the freedom of the press, assembly and expression in many European countries and beyond.

TV Free Europe reacts to these trends by asking the question, if today’s narratives of “change” able to tackle the social and environmental crisis we live in at all. Hasn’t mass media become, instead of being a source of information for all, a key to separating people into social bubbles?

TV Free Europe imagines theatre as a free channel between people, a satirical alternative to mass media. The project provides a joyful experience of “making TV” together through a series of practical research activities using performance and multimedia, public video shootings involving people with and without lived experience of the System Change as well as through theatrical late night shows.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the project partners have set up an online TV channel as a common platform to meet and share knowledge “in a televised way”. They have curated a weekly programme along different themes, containing archive audiovisual material mixed with self-produced videos – news, adverts, teletexts, talk shows and game shows.

Outputs of TV Free Europe

– six “local studios” formed
– university seminars in Nova Gorica and Szombathely
– workshops with high school students in Szombathely, involvement of students of HBLA in Oberwart
– TV channel with new and archive videos, video performances, interviews
– open-air performances, community performances (also in hybrid offline-online formats)
– gatherings, festivals (offine, online and in hybrid forms)
– a locally adaptable theatrical TV show presented in Budapest
– street exhibition in shop windows in Budapest and Szombathely

Who participated?

Pneuma Szöv. and KÖME- Association of Cultural Heritage Managers

Partners: OHO – Offenes Haus Oberwart (AT), University Nova Gorica (SL), UT Connewitz (Leipzig / DE), Tårnby Torv Festival (DK),

Zonic, Pneuma Vizuál, BOHÉM Klub, ELTE SEK Visual Art Department, Szombathely Art School Movie and animation course students and others, artists and guests.

Where did it take place?

Budapest, Szombathely, Leipzig (DE), Tårnby Torv – Copenhagen (DK), Oberwart (AT), Nova Gorica (SLO) and on air

Supporters

TV Free Europe was the only one cooperative program in the year of 2019 with a main Hungarian applicant, dealing with the memory of the system change in 1989 and with this, it continues the purposes of the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage program.
The project is co-funded by the European Union Creative Europe program, with the support of Allianz Kulturstiftung, the National Cultural Fund of Hungary and the US Embassy.