Text by CLOT Magazine
Loom Festival is an interdisciplinary arts festival based in Barcelona that includes interactive audiovisual installations, performances and musical acts. Loom Festival 2019 is taking place on May 4 at Utopia126 (Barcelona, Spain). Loom Festival aims to create a surrounding art experience that can transport the audience and tackle all of their senses.
The spectator is always essential to art pieces exploring current social issues. This new festival seems to bring a fresh aesthetic and ethos to a city that seems to have become a bit complacent with its established and more predictable music and art festivals. The mind behind the festival is Loom Collective, an artistic collective made up of a diverse international group of young professionals based in Barcelona. Loom Collective seeks to explore the meaning of art in the digital age and new ways of connecting with the audience. As well as to renew and diversify the artistic and cultural scene of the city via the creation of a web of local micro-scenes and innovative artistic proposals.
The program for this year’s editions is inspired by the perceptual phenomenon synesthesia -a condition that allows people who develop it to perceive senses in a hybrid way. With this as an articulating point, the festival will attempt to transport the spectator into a universe of visual music, audiovisual art, abstract cinema, and intermedia through artístic acts coming from different disciplines -technology, music, performance, and installations.
The line-up includes a balanced mix of national and international artists and performers. Through its programming Loom Collective defines the collective format as the creative structure that is most democratic and akin to the new generations, including Col.lectiu VVAA, who reinterpret current social issues such as consumption and human relationships through performance; Samxsen and Spanish Mafia, grown into multidisciplinary collectives working in music, fashion, graffiti, design, and dance; Ikram Bouloum and Rubén Patiño, who are both part of Zen55, a collective that questions and redesigns club spaces and sound and Moon Ribas, co-founder of the cyborg collective Transpecies Society.
Also worth mentioning is the Spanish debut of Sega Bodega’s new live show – one of London’s most respected producers-U.S. rapper Brooke Candy, who has been exploring fantasy and sex using different artforms. Another strong asset of the festival is collaborative acts between artists from completely different backgrounds, like the joint performance of dancer Candela Capitán and massively Instagram popular insect breeder Insecthaus. Some of the programmed installations will be created by artists such as Cristian Rizzuti, a pioneer in technological interactive installations affiliated with IAAC, Daniel Del Valle, prominent within the queer scene in Madrid and Octavi Serra, the multidisciplinary artist behind Loom’s Manifesto campaign imagery.
