MiRA Festival. Animals from other worlds
On Saturday the 10th of November, the Music and Audiovisual Research Festival of Barcelona, called MiRA, celebrates its second festival, with artists such as Lone, Actress, Dan Tombs, Julien Mier, Hyetal, Actop, Gnomalab, and the Desilence Studio. Organised for the first time last year in the former Fabra i Coats factory, MiRA will be repeated in the same location and has increased its offerings this year.
MiRA has become, in just two years, autumn’s must-see event for electronic music fans and visual arts lovers. MiRA is an independent festival, organised by a group of young professionals lead by Oriol Pastor, the event’s director.
The festival merges electronic music and visual arts, and it combines a festive mood with academic offerings, as parallel workshops are also organised. In fact, this year, MiRA has doubled the number of workshops, which have been in progress throughout the week. In addition, MiRA’s programme is made up of premiere shows, resulting from the collaboration between a DJ and an audiovisual artist.
The MiRA Festival was born in 2011, resulting from the desire to merge two disciplines that had traditionally been separated: visual arts and music. Oriol Pastor, the festival’s Director, shared his views with ACN a few days before the festival kicked off. They specifically did not want to hire artists who were already working together. MiRA’s objective, which is one of the event’s main attractions, is to have the artists work together for the first time and come to the festival with a world premiere show, combining music and visual arts.
“The festival comes up with a selection of musicians (DJs, but not necessarily of dance music) and audiovisual artists. It then proposes that they collaborate, to work together for some months before the event, and present a new show at the festival”, summed up Pastor.
The result of these research and proposition tasks are a 10 hour programme, offering 11 different shows by musicians and videojockeys (VJs), 6 audiovisual sets, 2 installations and an interactive dance performance. Lone, Actress, Dan Tombs, Julien Mier, Hyetal, Actop, Gnomalab and the Desilence Studio are some of the artists invited to this year’s festival. In fact, the festival aims to combine internationally recognised artists with new talent. MiRA combines experience with risky offerings, showing creations never seen before. The director himself confessed that, when the people responsible for hiring presented him with the list, he “didn’t know 70% of them”. What MiRA wants is “the people to trust the festival’s criteria”, in order to make them discover new artists, who come with the festival’s quality label.
Texts by the "Catalan News Agency"
MiRA Festival
Fabra I Coats
Barcelona, Spain
www.mirafestival.com
Festival visual identity here
PROJECTION
Concept: Animals from other worlds
Collaboration: Blow Factory + Dj Ragul
Illustrations: Bren Imboden
