Freeport

A creative research program for a world of humans, non-humans, and machines. Freeport is an independent study and production program led by artists, combining art methodologies with a radical design, critical technologies, new visualities, and the cultural ferments and even fervour of Internet communities. Their goal is to test new ways of exploring the networked planet, developing creative strategies that can seize new aesthetic opportunities and expose the ambiguities and technopolitical blind spots.

Freeport is a spin-off of The Influencers, a festival about unconventional art, guerrilla communication, and radical entertainment, founded in Barcelona by Eva & Franco Mattes and Bani Brusadin in 2004 and whose 15th edition took place in October 2019 at the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. Freeport builds upon the path opened by The Influencers and aims at broadening its strategy.

As an independent program, FREEPORT is about unconventional learning, rather than traditional education. The current academic structures often fail to catch up with the challenges that a data-driven, politically confusing, but aesthetically lively society poses to education and creative production.

FREEPORT responds to such challenges by putting unconventional creative practices at the forefront of a new type of non-corporate innovation. Using art as a methodology, we encourage both recognized and young experts to share their skills and discover new paths in the entangled, ever-changing patchwork of forces that aesthetically, materially, and politically shape our networked planet.

FREEPORT has been initially developed as a series of short pilot programs (2018-2020), preparing the ground for a longer independent study program, open to collaborations with academic and non-academic organizations.