XL has been originally conceived as a formula for the 40th anniversary of Drodesera and the 20th of Centrale Fies.
It's a research on an "off format" that breaks the summer one-shot tradition weaving together all the annual events.
The idea of XL was arising before these uncertain months came. It intended to quit the frame of the summer festival and to explode, to expand and to combine all the projects of a place of artistic research and production.
A formula that exploded through time, through disciplines, through practices and through the topics covered, that looks at art and culture as means of shared training to thinking and to action strengthening the ability to get into the narrative and nutritive processes of an artistic and alpine territory.
But while we were setting the explosion of activities, practices and curatorships bound to Centrale Fies, while we were painting us linked one to another inspired by nature, new Pangeas and "hyper" natures, an earthly and invisible being watched us falling in our own certainties and deepened our consciousness of a world of which humans have never been the center or the exception, but rather a piddling percentage of the existent.
Among the consequences all this had, there is also a suspended time during which we have kept alive the dialogue with the different parts of an enlarged and wounded community, where the distance between indigenous and foreign people suddenly widened, where we are all parceled out and incomplete, where pain and mourning seem never end but simply change their geographies.
Centrale Fies structures its public program from may to december 2020, splitting it into chapters: some of them have already been written, some have to be rewrote, and others are still to be imagined. Like a book that artists, curators and professionals write together and that can lead us through the present, intertwining with always different parts of a community that is able to imagine a festival as something to transform.
Whatever may still happen, we are going to preserve the virtuous circle of care and attention that guided Centrale Fies in every action during all these years. But now we are going to ask various parties to do the same, to take care of a bit of ecosystem with reciprocal actions: we are going to ask the building, the forms and forces of nature all around without exception, we are going to ask the audiences as well as curators, artists, guests and passers-by.
Even in its new visual identity XL rediscover an unexpected correspondence with what had been thought before these new times: always with a view to mutation, for the first time after many years Centrale Fies chooses not to imagine a theme and a title to implode questions and issues gathered and re-elaborated over the year. XL focuses on Centrale Fies' shapeshifting identity: a typeface – fusion of gothic and metal, since ever used for the graphic design of the art work space – that aims to keep paying back free expression to iconographic codes anchored to some imageries that had first absorbed them, and white shades left by the new pangeas of Supercontinent and Ipernatural that reemerge like fossils to trace out the continuity with that recent past when we used to imagine the world as an ideal habitat for polymorphous creatures.
XL highlights the will to keep the field clear and ready to welcome those narrations the new current format will give life to, as well as to activate an entire ecosystem dipped into the concept of care from where to become a magic, soothing and common potion to which every little thing will be a fundamental ingredient.
(At present this text is of a changeable nature because, to put it in Chuck Palahniuk's words, "the future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday").
