Stapari International Arts Summer Fest

Location :

STAPARI INTERNATIONAL ARTS SUMMER FESTIVAL
(July 26th - August 2nd 2015)

is a feast of all forms of domestic and foreign arts such as music, dance, drama, art performance, literature, photography, painting, etc.
It’s also a festival for ordinary people who would like to take part in it, collaborating and interacting with all artists.
The goal is to organize plenty of public artistic and cultural activities and promote the cultural and economic development of this small village which is virtually unknown to people in Serbia. It’s environmentally preserved and unspoiled even though it’s only 15 km far from the nearest town Uzice and the main tourist attractions.

- The idea and general program -

This is the first Stapari Summer Festival.
This is the first international event ever organized in this small, charming and virtually unknown Serbian village, near Uzice town.

The festival is organized by Biljana Bosnjakovic, a multimedia artist born in Uzice, currently residing in Verona (biljana-bosnjakovic.com), together with a musician Karla Hajman, known as Stereochemistry, born in Belgrade and residing in Berlin (stereochemistrymusic.com).

The festival is supported by Communal Council of Stapari, Municipality of Uzice (graduzice.org), by the Cultural Association Poselo (facebook.com/Poselo) and cooperative Libre from Verona (libreverona.it/), in collaboration with the Festival “Piano per Bassano” from Bassano del Grappa in Italy (pianoperbassano.it/), promoted by “Ma Thilda” from Berlin (facebook.com/MaThilda.Berlin/).

libreverona.it/pasqua-ortodossa-in-serbo-per-voi

radiopopolareverona.com/old/?q=content%2Fserbo-voi-un-mondo-da-scoprire-libre-con-biljana-bosnjakovic

verona-in.it/2015/04/09/in-serbo-per-voi-con-biljana-bosnjakovic-a-stapari

pianoperbassano.it/il-festival-di-stapari-al-rifugio-alpe-madre

This festival is also supported by the fellow villagers, offering their own modest houses as well as homemade food to friends from all over the world, for the very first time in the history of this village.

Our aim is to have the international artists and visitors from all over the world exchange their creative and life experience with local artisans, their home-made knitwear, brandies, traditional organic food products, their folklore and customs. And not only by hosting the international guests in the houses of the local families!

OPENING of the festival will take place in Stapari on Sunday, July 26, 2015, during the feast of the Orthodox Church St. Gabriel the Archangel. It will be a perfect opportunity to be seized by foreign visitors to discover traditions and rites of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
On the evening of July 26, there will be a huge opening celebration in Stapari Center, with the concert of the one foreign and one Serbian rock band.

CLOSING of the festival will be on Sunday, August 2, on the day of slava Ilindan. Slava is a typical Serbian religious festive day celebrating the patron in some Serbian families. Since last year slava has been part of UNESCO heritage. Saint Ilija is celebrated on Ilindan day.

(On that day, 115 years ago, i.e. in 1900, Uzice was the second in whole the world to have a hydroelectrical power plant on the Djetinja river, built according to Nikola Tesla's principles, just 5 years after the Niagara Falls power plant. It still works and produces electricity for the town, and is a seat of Uzice's Museum of Tecnology, with a statue of Nikola Tesla that dominates the main entrance.)

We welcome All Art Forms artists.
We welcome visitors who love and respect the Nature.

The THEME of the festival is simply: Stapari.
The IDEA of the festival: bringing back Man to the Nature.
The PURPOSE of the festival: helping Stapari not to become one of many extinct and forgotten Serbian villages.

The idea is to use the village and the nature as a platform and a stage for all art forms, in the respect of the environment.

The aim of the festival is to bring back the life and youth into the almost unknown village of Stapari through the means of art and culture, while at the same time bringing people in close touch to nature and forming a strong independent artist community.

Besides the planned workshops, guided tours, etc, we are open to any spontaneous creative process that may occur.

It’s a festival for for all kinds of artists of any age and nationality, whose works interact with nature, i.e. with non-urban environment. Individuals and collectives, established artists and new talents are welcome.
There is no media restrictions – music, literature, performance, painting, photography, video, installation, sculpture, multimedia are all included.
All techniques and artistic expressions will be considered.

All selected artworks, created and/or exhibited during the festival, will possibly remain in Stapari, upon agreement with the artist, as part of Stapari Permanent Art Exhibition.

It’s also a festival for ordinary people that could take part in it, collaborating and interacting with all artists.

This one-week long festival will be an international cultural & artistic event that will involve both artists from around the world and local artisans in the exhibition in various venues around the village, with an aim of valuing both the tourist potentials and cultural heritage of Stapari.

We invite artists to create, perform, experiment and transmit their art, possibly but not necessarily, involving the Stapari landscape, using the local materials (stone, wood, wool, etc.), in many locations: at a farm, in the forest, on a flowery meadow, near the waterfall, in the cave - all very intriguing and exciting places, even inside of the school of Stapari, in the square of the village center, in the Dom Kulture (Home of Culture), where a stage can accommodate even a most demanding theater.

All works, created and exhibited during the festival, will possibly remain in in the village as part of the Stapari Permanent Multimedia Art Exhibition, both outdoors and/or inside of few municipality's buildings, upon agreement with the artist.

- How was the idea of Stapari Summer Fest created? -

A project called Poselo (http://www.facebook.com/Poselo) was founded in autumn of 2012 in Verona by two sisters Biljana and Mirjana Bosnjakovic from Uzice, originally from the very Stapari. Poselo was conceived as a collaboration between Verona and Stapari, with the aim of promoting Zlatibor District, where the village Stapari is located. Over the past years, the Association Poselo has organized many events in Italy including very prestigious venues such as the art gallery Sala Birolli, owned by the Municipality of Verona. In fact, it has aroused curiosity among Italians to familiarize themselves with the village and how to reach it.

Several guys from Verona have visited this village so far, all of them with a desire to come back to Stapari. During their stay in Stapari, and the Biljana and Mirjana's family house, every single day they went to explore the surrounding area, even arriving in Sarajevo. On these occasions, they were accompanied by guys from Uzice: Mira, Sreten and Sasha, and out of the blue a powerful Italian-Serbian friendship was born.

Here is the genesis of those travels:

In July 2014, Claudio Gnaccarini, the scientist from Verona, as well as the Biljana's friend, was the first foreign tourist to have visited many places of Stapari region. During these experiences, Claudio kept an extensive travel diary, and as soon as he came back to Verona, he informed all his friends and colleagues of this, as he put it, the most important and the best travel of his life. Thanks to his enthusiasm, many other guys from Verona decided to visit Stapari in August 2014. One of them, Gianluca De Santi, the artist from Verona, shot a series of amazing photographs, and then decided to come back to Stapari next winter to shoot the same places, this time covered with snow, creating an unique photography series of Stapari and the surrounding.

The Association Poselo, together with the cultural cooperative Libre from Verona, intend to publish the book that will consist of both Claudio's diary and Gianluca's photographs.
That's why Biljana, together with Lia Arrigoni and Susanna Morgante - both founders of cooperative Libre, decided to organize an event dedicated to Stapari and its surrounding in March of 2015.
This was the reason for Biljana to decide finally to get in touch with the Communal Council of Stapari, through their just created web page. After few days they have finally replied and decided to support her and to collaborate on promotion of Stapari.
After that very successful first event at Libre, Biljana and Lia decided to repeat it in April of 2015 and during this second event Biljana has announced that her many years old idea to organize an international artistic event in Stapari is about to become reality. During those two events, Libre from Verona and Stapari Communal Council with its president Slobodan Kurlagic were connected via Skype. The second event was filmed by Serbian National TV RTS. Many important serbian and italian newspapers and radios talked about this story.
That's how Stapari Festival was born.
The book written by Claudio and illustrated by Gianluca's photography, will be presented by Poselo and Libre in the course of Stapari Summer Fest, during the vernissage of Gianluca's photo exhibition, through reading of and commenting on parts of Claudio's diary, translated into English and Serbian for this occasion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapari
https://www.facebook.com/Stapari.Summer.Fest
https://www.facebook.com/events/1651760915043610/
https://www.facebook.com/events/662275700574286/