An international call is touring Europe. Its name is Squeeze It and it calls young European artists under 30 years old: those who create and give shape to contemporary ideas at the crossroads of visual arts, theatre and communication technologies.

The launcher of Squeeze It (for a new international edition, the third one) is Trieste Contemporanea, a think-tank based at the eastern margin of Italy, but working on the horizon of Europe for decades. The deadline for submitting applications is November 12th.

Conceived in 2014 as a sustainable, low cost, small size project, Squeeze It features its title as a motto. If a lack of resources prevents young people from emerging, Squeeze It’s recommendation is to move on by developing new formats and skills: i.e. squeezing them.
Fluidity as a relationship between the arts
The biennial contest is aimed at a new generation of international artists and encourages future professionals to create new projects characterized by “the dynamic meeting between the new creativity of the Theatre, the languages of the Visual Arts and Information Technology integrated into the New Media”. A contemporary focus for the arts, that increasingly leans toward fluidity in performance, dance, poetry, sound engineering and video mapping, interweaving stimuli and mutually reinforcing signals.
Previous editions were promising. In 2014 and 2016 Squeeze It winners were a Croatian team (Komična Hunta) and a performer from Belgium (Bastien Poncelet). Both under 30, of course.
Dedicated to that activist of culture Franco Jesurun, in the past two editions Squeeze It has defined its peculiar profile. The basic proposal, aimed at young European creatives, is to build a low budget live project in small format, which lasts no more than 16 minutes and can be placed in a space of 4m x 4m x 4m. The competition does not involve registration fees, but the sending of a video clip which is an abstract of the project (maximum duration 4 mins.).
Side by side with video-makers
The goal is also a sustainable and low-cost award. In addition to a few days’ workshop in Trieste with professionals of the individual sectors, Squeeze It’s prize consists of a collaboration with a video-maker and international director.
Alongside the winner (or winners), this director will be in charge of creating an artistic video product of professional quality and impact. In the first edition the award consisted of the days that Komična Hunta spent side by side with the Italian-Albanian artist Adrian Paci. For the second edition, the director assigned to Poncelet was the Croatian Dalibor Martinis (www.dalibormartinis.com). The 2018 edition foresees as the ‘prize’ the Polish Mirosław Bałka (www.miroslaw-balka.com), who will conduct the videoproduction workshop.


The final stages of the 2018 edition will take place in Trieste, in the second week of December. Final evening with the proclamation of the winner will be Saturday December 15th, at Studio Tommaseo, where Trieste Contemporanea is based.
The call, in Italian and English, can be viewed at this address.
The Squeeze It site also features a gallery with videos sent by all the finalists : an excellent atlas on which one can draw today a route for young European creativity.
