Announcing MFRU30: the 30. International Festival of Computer Arts

The 30th International Computer Art Festival, titled MFRU30: Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building, will serve as a dynamic crossroads for multidisciplinary artists, exhibitions, interactive installations, and discursive events. Running from October 18 to 27, 2024, the festival will take place at Velika Kavarna at Glavni Trg in Maribor (SI).

Simultaneously, we are announcing the official opening of the festival, scheduled for October 18 at 7 PM at the main venue, Glavni Trg 1.

Artists: freštreš, Dasha Ilina, Rok Kranjc, Pablo Somonte Ruano, Alice Strete & Simon Browne, Undoing.Studio, Xcessive Aesthetics, Inari Wishiki

Curated by Davide Bevilacqua and Lara Mejač.

This year’s edition of MFRU, the International Festival of Computer Arts, titled Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building, explores the positioning of digital and media art towards sustainable and social forms of living economies and the commerce of goods.

Observing the global polycrisis and the growing discussions about abandoning the capitalist logic raise the question of what this future would look like and how we could achieve it. Instead of looking for pre-packaged solutions, the festival calls for unconventional thinking, experimental settings and community-centred processes while imagining how a post-consumerist world could be structured and how it could function.

The festival program combines economies, ecologies and intermedia discourse by focusing on fundamental areas, such as real estate and urban regeneration, nourishment and basic needs, fashion and beauty, technologies and entertainment, but also nostalgia and rituals, and generally critiquing a lifestyle linked to individual wealth. The invited artistic positions reflect on these dimensions proposing works that take a critical stance on common value systems and at the same time exploit their contradictions in order to develop visions and tools for a social life that is not centred merely on consumption.

Off the Shelf explores viable alternatives for low-impact, regenerative and community-oriented projects and, in the context of the climate emergency, contributes to envisioning a radical reorganisation of society.

Introducing the curators of the 30th International Computer Arts Festival;

Davide Bevilacqua is a media artist and curator interested in network infrastructures and technological activism as well as experimental presentation formats for artistic work and research. His current research deals with the environmental and social impact of internet technologies and platforms, looking critically at digital greenwashing and seeking escape routes from platform capitalism. https://davidebevilacqua.com

Lara Mejač works as an independent curator and producer in the field of contemporary visual and intermedia art. Between 2016 and 2023 she was the curator, producer and programme coordinator at DobraVaga Gallery. In addition, she has curated and produced exhibitions in various galleries in Slovenia and abroad, including galleries Ravnikar Gallery Space, Galerija Kresija, Galerija Fotografija, Galerija Vžigalica, Galerija Škuc, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery - GMK (Zagreb), Improper Walls (Vienna) and participated in the organisation of various projects, such as the Yami-Ichi Internet Art Fair (produced by Kino Šiška, Aksioma and the Slovenian Computer Museum) and the ARIA Summer School (produced by Projekt Atol and Šum magazine). In 2021, she curated the online exhibition Off the Hook: Accept and Continue, and she also dealt with the topic of online exhibitions and virtual spaces in her master’s thesis. She is the curator of the intermedia exhibition series Enter Here at Ravnikar Gallery Space and the co-founder and member of the curatorial team of ETC. magazine.

More about the programme following soon.