Home - Diver Festival 24
  • Dor Frank

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During the pandemic, the Diver Festival developed the idea of ״BeCompany״, as a way of preserving the artistic act. We aimed to experience the separateness of our lives, all the while we strove to go beyond it. We wanted to experiment with a togetherness that proposes value beyond radical individuality and present an event that bears the hallmarks of its many partners.

Now, as collectivist-repressive voices increasingly take center stage, we are motivated by an urgent impulse to defend the thought of the self and not just prosecute it. It’s not about the shallow empowering of personal voices, but rather is concerned with how a singular act can express the shared experience, serving as an empowering tool for the company.

We want to find ways to stop denying that we too suffer from a malignant cultural syndrome that binds us and keeps us from changing the grim reality of the present and the future. We aim to recognize the lies that have taken root in ourselves, for instance, that consumption is a choice, or that democracy is a free market. And yet, we also don’t wish to part with the wonders of freedom. How can we protect ourselves from the threatening groupism of religion and conservatism, and at the same time not be corporate tools? How can we protect ourselves without resorting to a blanket consecration of our way of life?

We propose that we begin seeing ourselves not as consumers who confess their sins or as citizens who are satisfied with their achievements, but rather as embarrassed and confused individuals who must confront, precisely now, the aporia that our common culture has reached.

The festival invites us to gather together, to the sounds of music, party and concert, as an exhibition of solos emerges from spaces we share as friends: the dance floor and the gallery space. Each solo takes on the difficult task of dealing with various paradoxes forged by the ideology of our culture. Sexuality, fulfillment, fertility, honesty, future — all concepts we experience through the mediation of their contradictory and conflictual manifestations in each of our lives. Together the solos are a festival, an event marking an occasion of confronting all that we must overcome, jointly and severally.

These days, with our country seized by a messianic vision, the time has come to scrutinize the state of self. What is the state of this D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y we scream about in the streets? How did we contribute to its downfall?