.move forward

This year's Werkleitz Festival is focussed on Mexico. The festival presents 13 new works by Mexican and European media artists along a 500 metre long exhibition path through Halle's inner city. .move forward will be hosting the majority of the works for the first time internationally. The participating artists work in such diverse genres as animation film, sound art, video installation, web based and interactive installation, documentary film and photography. Social phenomena and controversies, made all the more manifest by being mirrored in foreign surrounds, constitute the background or object for most of the works. The individual artworks have one thing in common: they were all made with the help of exchange stipends provided by the partner organisations of the European Media Art Network (EMAN). The stipends brought Mexican artists to Europe and European artists to Mexico. The movement across borders reappears in the festival title .move forward that also echoes the successful Werkleitz Festival .move from 2009. In addition to the exhibition, .move forward casts a cinematic eye at Mexico from without and within. Eisenstein's legendary film material from the 1930s, Alejandro Jodorowsky's LSD western El Topo and the short film programmes México Afuera (Mexico from the outside) and México Adentro (Mexico from the inside) grant insight into a fascinatingly ambiguous country.
Parties and concerts in Plan3 will stretch out the nights at the opening and closing weekends with a cast of DJs and the formation Sonido Changorama hailing from Mexico City, where their explosive mix of Latin American and electro rhythms have made them Cumbia Futura icons. Let the Mexican sun shine over Halle this October!