FIBA Market is a visibility platform for foreign programmers. Internationalizing the performing arts’ sector and positioning Argentine artists in the global festival circuit—that is the main goal of the Festival, which, each year, congregates an enormous amount of programmers in Buenos Aires, willing to come into contact with local artists. But this year the dynamic was altered for obvious reasons, and this forces us to become more creative—even more—and try to understand what a performing arts market is really about.
While we hope that, in the near future, the movement of artists, now halted due to the closing of borders, resumes, we continue to wager on bringing them together in order to generate a mingling dynamic, thus having the chance to export ideas, concepts and work methods.
That is why, from Mercado FIBA we encourage local artists in the development of strategies that will allow them to position themselves in the global market, through different instances. On the one hand, there are the pitches, which are live encounters between an artist and a group of programmers. But, most importantly, there’s also everything that isn’t synchronic. FIBA will offer the participating programmers a series of tools to be able to access our artists’ proposals. First of all, there are the concrete production that nourish the program of this edition of the Festival, but there is also a series of “self-portraits” through which the local artists introduce themselves to the world and display a work dynamic, a way of understanding stage language and a particular technique for production and staging of plays. This way, both the technique and the project itself will reach more than three hundred programmers who, in their own time and from their own territories, will be able to come into contact with local production throughout the entire year.
That is why we firmly believe that, in these markets, one doesn’t sell—aesthetics and poetics are put in circulation.