Puppets & Design

Objects are all around us every day. They can be useful, or beautiful. We often use them in a careless and automatic way. About 1 century ago with the rise of contemporary Design, objects became an expression of social imaginary, material shapes of the Zeitgeist as well as of the views of their designer: a vehicle of culture. Thanks to the intuition of a specific branch of puppetry, which we will call “Object & Figure Theatre”, objects can also be storytellers. They thus transcend their material and utilitarian dimension to earn a soul, a life, a destiny of their own.

The Puppets & Design project (P&D) aims to emancipate everyday objects from their utilitarian feature, instead lifting them up to the role of meaning and artistic expression conveyers, communication and intercultural dialogue tools. P&D will interweave the paths of puppet theater artists and of designers. The designers’ competence can help puppetry to renew itself; puppetry and object animation will help designers to rethink objects and give them a soul by giving them specific shapes. P&D will innovate the Puppetry practice and increase its popularity with adults, children, families, schools by cross-fertilization with design practitioners (professional designers, scholars, students) through a set of cultural, educational and promotional EU activities.

P&D involves 3 puppet theatres (from IT, CZ, SI) and a higher education school of design (from ES). The project will provide new artistic and professional inputs to both puppetry and design practitioners, and to the audience, whom the project aims to expand and diversify by focusing on objects which could belong to everyone’s daily experience yet can provide self-produced artistic experiences. The project’s dissemination events strategy will foster knowledge of the historical and cultural heritage of the “Object & Figure Theatre”, often wrongly confined to the children’s world, gaining to it an increasingly widespread and diverse audience.

Funded projects

MUSICVILLE – Green European Opera

Operation Nova

Kino x Games

FASIH - Future Art and Science Industrial Heritage

Cultural BEES

Is this us?

Climate Art Fusion Caravane (CARAVANE)

Moving Balkans

Youth Art for the Earth (YAFE)

Shadow Pandemic: Hidden Voices

Open House Europe (OHEu)

Third Stage

VERSOPOLIS – WHERE POETRY LIVES

December: Uncomfortable Beings, Azra, Best Imaginary Friends Forever

LINA - Learn, Interact, and Network in Architecture

Reactivating unused urban spaces through architecture and arts (ReCITYing)

Art Nouveau: a new EUtopia

Creative Industries Development Centre (KUL)

Web 3.0 Accelerator for Sustainable Cultural Tourism (Web3Tour)

Studiotopia: Enter the Symbiocene with Arts and Science (Studiotopia 2)

Bio Awakening - developing bio-art practices in Western Balkan

TestArt

GREENSTAGE

Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA)

Transmedia stories of insularity (TRAST)

Female Digital Creativity (FLUX)

Planet Hope (New European Fiction) (PH)

More than a Book (MTaS)

Our Little Library: Through literary bridges to reading adventures (OLLLB)

Connected with Books (CWB)

Exploring Expanded Publishing: EX-Pub

Thinking Publishing (ThinkPub)

Novel Europe (NovelEU)

REVIVE

Temporama: Mini Slate 2023

Studi Virc: Mini Slate 2023

The 10th and 11th edition of FeKK - Ljubljana Short Film Festival

The 20th and 21st Kino Otok - Isola Cinema International Film Festival

20. and 21. ANIMATEKA International animated film festival

Film in Hospital 2.0

EU Youth Cinema: Green Deal 2024-2026

Cinema without barriers (CWB)

Literary Agent Platform: Capacity building (LAP CB)

Tramal Films Mini Slate 22 (TFMini22)

Vertigo Slate 2022: Chestnuts, Memory of Autumn Mists, OHO, Splashing around

Staragara slate 22

Our Little Library: Literary exchanges (OLL LE)

Testing Ground (TestG)

Better Live

Variola - Dark Spring TV series

SEMA

Paradiso

Leave the door open

The Big Green

The Long Way Down

New approaches for local media (NEWLOCAL)

Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found (LLB3)

Time For Live Art (LIVETIME)

Women Power in Comics (WOMCOM)

Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience (MODINA)

Fortissimo (FF)

Spring Cleaning

Animation Festival Network

CulturalDeTour - Sustainable Cultural Tourism by Design Driven Innovation

Building the future of democracy through art, science and technology (EUDigitalDeal)

CEE Animation Forum 2021

The Museum of the Commons. Towards a Healthier Arts Ecosystem (MoC)

ACT: Art, Climate, Transition

Baths, gothic churches and miners’ houses

Fake Lies

THE FILM CORNER RELOADED - A CULTURAL APPROACH

CINEMINI EUROPE

FC Freedom

Body

Movies in Motion

Voix de la Poesie Europeenne

Trust me, I'm an artist

The Faces Behind the Nose - Promoting Hospital Clowning as a Recognized Genre of Performing Arts

SYMBOLS - Culture of Death& Cultural Life: New audiences and creations around European Cemeteries!