Images from day 1 of 2019 Festival - Breaking the Fifth Wall, A long overdue diary with words by Steve Maher and photos by Antti Ahonen.

Dear Diary,

A long overdue archive post of photos from the 2019 Pixelache Festival - Breaking the Fifth Wall. Photos by Antti Ahonen 

The first day in Helsinki arrived, following the pre-festival events in Seinäjoki lead by festival Co-Curator Alan Bulfin. The Helsinki side of Breaking the Fifth Wall (Saša Nemec, Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and Steve Maher) with Bulfin inbound via rail from up North eagerly kicked off the result of over a year of preperations.  

The festival began with a workshop at Oranssi hosted by our partners at Trojan Horse with LIVE ACTION ROLE-PLAY. Live Action Role-Play; LARP, is a critical play for a first-person audience. In a LARP players relate to a fictional world from the first person perspective of a fictional character. The process of larping together generates a temporary community, a game world. 

Meanwhile in the Pixelache Offices, the crew from KERU were busy at work making food for the entire festival team. Keru is a non-profit open community fridge located at the Setlementtitalo in Kallio, Helsinki. The aim of the concept and activities is to reduce food waste and to support sustainable food culture. Keru offers an easy way to take part in solving the global food waste issue. It is open and free to everyone who wants to share and/or collect food. As part of the 2019 festival KERU graciously agreed voluntarily manage the catering for our festival. This collaboration was particuarly special as we see KERU as a like minded organisation, dealing with issues of sustainability only perhaps in a more direct and socially beneficial manner. We were all surprised at pixelache, to see literal kilo tons of foord arrive on the weekend prior to the festival. It really quantified for us how much perfectly good food goes to waste, something you can abstractly read in a Gaurdian article but only truely realise when it's all laid out in crates where you'd spent the half year previous writing emails and looking at spreadsheets. Fresh Strawberries, bananas, by the crateload. 

Our office too, not only served as a laboratory for culinary waste reappropriation, it was also the main headquarters of our incredibly spread out festival, with over 6 different locations everywhere inbetween East-Helsinki and downtown Katajanokka.

Our first day featured and was primarily aimed towards our vernissage event, at the Bio Art Societies SOLU space, it featured the majority of the static works in the 2019 festival including a Pixelache edition of  Varvara and Mar's Data Shop, a new video work by Heyon Han, an archive of audio work caried out by Pixelache's own Biosginals project and a brand new comissioned project Quick Fix by Dries Depoorter. 

 

The Night concluded at Myymälä 2 as part of our co-hosted performance festival Seven of Seven featuring UTO-UTO 

With the first day over, we went to bed to get some rest, we would need it, six more days of festival activities followed.