With the 2019 edition, the Institute of Arts Student Festival (FEIA) completes 20 years of existence. The historical recovery, in addition to a more inclusive and diverse program, marks the twentieth FEIA, called FEIAvinte. Workshops, dance, theater and music shows continue until Sunday (13), not only at Unicamp, but also in public squares and cultural spots in Campinas, promoting access to art beyond the university space.
“We have understood the need to expand more and more, the university is a space of knowledge, so this provides for diversity. And, to have greater diversity, we need to talk to the non-academic community too”, says Júlia Vilar, one of the event organizers and a Performing Arts student.
Therefore, she explains that there is a movement “from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside” in programming. Academic artists present their productions outside the university space and productions by non-academic artists take place at Unicamp, democratizing access to art, circulating and crossing knowledge.
Inclusion and diversity
For Júlia, over the two decades of the festival, new demands emerged. This meant that FEIA had, that year, exhibitions and performances more inclusive. Audio description resources, simultaneous translation into Libras and tactile exhibitions were made available in part of the program. The curatorship also sought to cover themes that dialogue with society's historical demands, consolidating a program aligned with political reflections and various identity biases.
Unicamp Social Sciences student, Bruno Rodrigues da Silva, participated in one of the FEIA workshops and states that the experience was important because it dealt with healing processes related to the survival of racialized and non-cisgender bodies. “That’s what art is, it needs to be aimed at the population, this exchange that exists is really cool and FEIA is a great opportunity”, he says.
Rescue
The organization of FEIA is entirely carried out by students and takes place on a rotating basis. This year, around 50 people are leading the edition, from all IA courses, under the general coordination of Carolina Gasquez, a student of the Dance course. Carolina emphasizes that the twentieth edition of FEIA is intended to be a kind of revival. Although the festival has taken place uninterruptedly for all twenty years, explains the coordinator, the recent context of disinvestment in education and questions regarding the role of art are external factors that have been demobilizing students. “In the last two years there has been a huge decline and this year we decided to make a milestone of starting again”, he comments, highlighting that FEIAvinte has the mission of reviving the potential of art, praising it as an “instrument of change social and engagement”.
To give more strength and also recapture the historical memory of the Festival, former students who had participated in other editions of FEIA were brought into the program. One of these former students is Felipe Macedo, who today makes up the Duo Mangabeira together with Stephen Bolis. Felipe organized the 2014 edition of FEIA and highlights that the event is a great opportunity in terms of training, providing students with practical learning in cultural production. Furthermore, he notes that it is a time to show society the high-level artistic productions that are carried out in a public educational institution. “FEIA is essential for us to bring to the attention of the population the importance of the public institution as a mediator of all this”, he states.
The first edition
In the 2000s, the first edition of FEIA took place, also in October. AnaCris Medina, who was part of the creation of the event, tells how the initiative came about. “The initial idea of the festival was to create an exchange event between the Institute of Arts, the general public of the university and the city of Campinas. All courses had a large production of work, which ended up being shared primarily within IA and among course colleagues themselves.”
She recalls that the creation of a festival came from the IA Academic Center (CAIA) with three central concerns: boosting interdisciplinarity, attracting the general population to the campus and providing training spaces for students. “With this in mind, we created a program with presentations from all areas, exhibitions, workshops, lectures. There was a minimum structure offered by CAIA and we looked for support and sponsorship to make payment of fees, transportation, food, rental of materials and promotional material possible”.
The creation of the unique festival, uniting isolated initiatives, is remembered as one of FEIA's greatest successes for Ana Caldas Lewinsohn, also a student at the time. Ana performed during the first festival and celebrates the fact that FEIA has consolidated itself as a plural event, even in a context of attacks on artistic productions and restrictions on cultural development bodies. “The more we try to censor the arts, the more we try to make the arts unviable with funding cuts, or bias productions, this strengthens us more than it annihilates us, it makes us stronger and fight even more vehemently for our existence and because of our importance in the social context, in the human context”, he analyzes.
