22^th MFRU Trust 1: The Local Trust

Over three years of "Trust", MFRU functioned as an autonomous zone—a space for exchange, collaboration, and reflection. With the trilogy, the festival explored its evolving relationship with the city, the national context, and the international community. Each edition built new bridges: first by engaging local spaces and citizens, then by connecting national institutions and artists, and finally by focusing exclusively on international women artists.

Conceived as a living organism, the festival operated as a laboratory of knowledge exchange at the intersection of art, science, technology, and humanity. Through concepts such as workshopology, bedology, and foodology, it fostered an environment where artistic creation, research, and everyday life intertwined—where programming, cooking, and collaboration coexisted. Drawing from global artistic communities, the festival redefined conventional formats, emphasizing collective experience over traditional exhibition models.

As part of its fundamental approach, MFRU actively engaged with local educational institutions, recognizing students and educators as key participants in shaping future artistic and theoretical discourse:

"MFRU, most likely as any festival anywhere and anytime, takes the connection with the local, national, and international community as a necessity and as its essence. At the same time, the festival, as a necessity and as the basic essence, also understands the connection and active cooperation with local educational institutions, schools, faculties as well as pupils, students and their professors. These are our new audiences, new experts and theoreticians, future authors, practitioners, respectively all of the above mentioned is a part of an emerging global macro network and its events, which are transferred, processed, enriched, and returned enhanced with local, micro-level facts and special features. During the 'Trilogy of Trust,' MFRU institutionalized student scholarships at four institutes of different Slovenian academies and faculties (Maribor, Ljubljana, Nova Gorica) where students are studying in the field of interdisciplinary art, new-inter-trans-media art, and computer art. Last year, in 2017, the festival connected and built a bridge, and with the FGPA, Maribor, conducted a joint exhibition-workshop situation respectively student-research situation, the product of which is also this publication as part of a book that is now in creation." – Miha Horvat

Trust served as both a central theme and a structural foundation, prompting critical reflection on cultural patterns, cooperation, and sustainability. In this framework, the festival itself became a work of art—a medium through which artists, producers, and audiences connected in real-time, shaping and reshaping the dynamics of artistic collaboration.