Great news everyone! A project I’ve submitted to the german Federal
Cultural Foundation has been accepted and sponsored. The frame is 100.000 EURO JOB, a project which consists in supporting a few young artists to make projects that express their vision of work.

The piece is called 20 Minutes – The Podcast Opera (in German 20 Minuten – Die Podcast Oper). It’s an opera that will be available online as a podcast. The project is very ambitious: there will be a webpage, a video made by another youg artist – Mathieu Dagorn (www.mathieu.dagorn.com) – for live perfomances and the premiere will take place in December 2006 in Zagreus, a great gallery in Berlin.

Here’s an extract of a text I’ve written about the project:

2O minutes! That’s the name of a magazine handed out every morning in London, Paris or Stockholm underground stations. Why 20 Minutes? Because it’s the average free time the average worker has during an average morning journey to work. In today’s world, that’s often the only time of the day when one can have a little time by oneself.

My project is a Podcast Opera about this situation. It’s avant-garde piece of music taking place in a wagon where people take the most of this precious idle time to think about their lives. And it will lasts 20 minutes so one can just upload it on their Mp3 player and listen to it en route, hence the name Podcast Opera (a podcast is a show that’s not broadcasted but available to download – for further informations, see here).

On stage, the opera can be either performed by musicians or just played trough speakers, as Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry or even Karlheinz Stockhausen started to do in the 1950’s, when they were inventing Electronic Music. […]

One of the purposes of this project is to find a path between the workers and modern art.

© 2006 justin lepany