44th International Puppet Festival of Bilbao

During the FIT, a professional meeting will be held between companies and agents involved in these arts (centers, festivals, professionals, etc.) to encourage the creation and development of a platform that represents this group before institutions with a common voice and interests. We will coordinate this activity, making the festival space and program available for this idea, without leading what this event may produce in its conclusions.

In this year's artistic program, and as is customary at the FIT in Bilbao, we promote the transversality and interdisciplinarity of puppet and object theater with the rest of the performing arts.

The use of object animation techniques (indeterminate or anthropomorphic) is a constant in current performing arts creation and marks an innovative line in this creative sector. This reality means that the art of object animation has an important relevance in new dramaturgies, creating synergies and artistic cross-fertilization between genres that until now have remained autonomous, such as circus, dance, visual theater, and even the music scene.

At the FIT in Bilbao, we want to highlight this reality, offering our audience the opportunity to enjoy these artistic fusions in the form of images and aesthetic examples of a society that experiences rapid rhythms and changes and where interculturalism is a necessity in order to understand and normalize our daily lives.

Fusion is not a deforming aberration. With the right perspective, it can be something beautiful and enriching.

We also understand innovation to mean the social and educational application of the arts. To this end, we will carry out two themed activities within our program:

We will have an exhibition on the theme of “peace” and “non-violence.” We will work on these concepts from the perspective of human and civil rights. In this exhibition, we will create an illustrated itinerary with objects from different cultures across the five continents. Through children's games, toys, and other cultural elements, we will try to position ourselves as human beings in relation to certain structural functions and our ability to analyze, reflect, and react collectively and creatively in relation to our civil rights.

It will be open every day during the 44th FITB and will welcome both the general public and schoolchildren, as well as visitors from social and cultural associations.

This exhibition will give us the opportunity to work on this theme and other related topics, such as gender equality, consumerism, poverty, inequality, and interculturality from the perspective of social peace and well-being or the pendulum of “no war” and the self-serving arbitrariness of conflicts, through guided tours and complementary creative workshops.

For the second consecutive year, we will carry out an activity that will take place during the months of October (pre-festival) and November, in which we will collaborate with the EMAUS NOMADAS JAIALDIA program of the Emaus Social Foundation in the municipality of Derio. In this activity, we will carry out an educational and pedagogical intervention in the public school of Derio using the artistic technique of shadow theater applied to social intervention, with the theme of human rights in childhood. We will also hold a workshop on the theme of stories and collective memory with the users of Emaus Social. All associations in the area (APNABI, Lantegi Batuak, Mañarikua, Nagusien Etxea, BBT, the municipal toy library, and the public school in Derio) will be invited to this activity. We will hold workshops for three weeks in October and November at the public school and the results will be presented during the FIT, together with a performance by one of the three professional companies (Catalonia, Greece, Italy) at an event to commemorate the Charter of Children's Rights.

We will also present the cultural artwork created at TXOTENA GUNEA with the gypsy women's collective ΝEVIPEΝ.

For this edition, we are working to establish a collaboration with the ONCE Regional Delegation to jointly organize an event to raise awareness about blind and visually impaired people, taking advantage of the programming at TXOTENA GUNEA of the interactive installations entitled “The Hospital of Books” on November 15 and 16 and “The Circus of the Senses” on November 22 and 23. The aim is to join in with activities that raise awareness of the problems of disability in everyday city life and human activity.