Who are we?
Cifas
Cifas is a place of learning and experimentation for performing art in the city and its fringes.
Cifas embraces an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on the interaction between art and public space and the political dimensions of art. Cifas' activities include training programmes for professional artists, seminars, participatory workshops and interventions that stimulate, enrich and question contemporary artistic practices. Cifas pursues training through practice, co-learning and encounters. All of this is supported by a digital tool, the Cifasotheque: a platform for artistic and methodological resources, to share and extend our activities with a wider audience.
Cifas has three main focuses:
Learning
Ongoing education of artists, cultural workers and other specific audiences through invitations to Belgian and international artists and specially designed modules.
> Artistic Workshops
Invitations to Belgian and international artists to run a workshop with professional artists.
An annual programme of support and mutual aid for 12 artists with a project in progress around performing art in the city. They work together on prototypes of their own projects to test their ideas and refine their method.
An annual seminar, held during Kunstenfestivaldesarts, bringing together 20 international producers working in performing art, who wish to explore the urgent issues and current problems of production and question the role of the producer.
Cifas teams up with La Bellone for a module in their seminar series, co-inviting a dramaturg working with public space.
Artistic Encounters: Feral
Feral is a site-specific festival that re-invents our relationship with the city and questions changes in artistic practices: encounters and interventions in the city, co-created with various participants from Brussels and elsewhere.
Resources: Cifasotheque
The Cifasotheque is an online resource centre for performing art in the city: publications (Revue Feral, KLAXON), toolbox, glossary, address book, Cifas’ archives; for a wider circulation of ideas, on a local and international scale, practices and methods that emerge as part of Cifas’ activities.
We rely on open source tools and philosophy: inclusiveness and facilitating access to information while respecting the authors.
The Cifasotheque supports learning and extends the artistic programme (resonances, investigations, testimonies).
Cifas’ values
In a cultural environment structured by competition and privilege, we value mutual aid and encourage mutual support, alliances and their contagion. We believe that everyone has knowledge to share. We promote alternative knowledge and learning by doing. Our activities are conceived and designed with this in mind.
Cifas is part of the momentum giving practical effect to the cultural rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and defined in the Fribourg Declaration (2007).
We work for social justice and against all forms of discrimination. We integrate equality and inclusion into all our activities and work actively to overcome barriers that prevent access to our programme and activities.
Cifas conducts its activities within the framework of the ideas that emerged from Cultural Studies, particularly feminist, LGBTQI+ and decolonial thinking.
We offer a space for risk-taking and experimentation.
We see all our actions as opportunities for exchange and transformation.