PLACCC Festival
Art that takes you by surprise

PLACCC Festival was launched in 2008 by Artopolis Association in order to create a platform for site-specific performance and art in public space. PLACCC aims to introduce new artistic initiatives to the Hungarian public and to inspire and support local artists in creating site-specifically.

Artists draw inspiration from well-known sites and objects of our everyday urban existence in order to transform them and re-define them in a refreshing way. They use the city as a stage and invite us to re-discover it with them.

In the first edition of PLACCC in 2008 spectators 'learned to fly‘ in the courtyard of the former Socialist Party Academy, were taken on an exciting bicycle journey into their inner realm of thoughts and memories and joined the search for love in a shopping mall.

2009 brought other forms of artistic thrills: an opera in slang in the underground labyrinth of a cave, concrete mixer trucks were transformed into giant urban disco balls, derelict basement doors were re-decorated in vibrant colors and algae was used to clean smog-infused city air, while the passers-by themselves could participate in building 'community couches‘ from recycled material in one of the popular squares of Budapest.

In 2010 PLACCC brings site-specific performance and art in public space not only to Budapest, but also to Pécs. In May 2010 during a special edition of the festival in the European Capital of Culture, a new audience had a chance to encounter exciting and thought-provoking site-specific work created by local and international artists. PLACCC Pécs focused on the fine line between public and private: spectators became voyeurs and accomplices in a theatrical thriller staged in the backyard of a family home, ventured on an apartment adventure tour in Uran City and discovered surprising land art installations in city centre.

In Fall 2010 PLACCC returned to Budapest with its largest scale event to date. Audience could embark upon an SMS-guided performance walk created and adapted to Budapest by the Danish hello!earth collective or visit the allotments of Sashegy which were transformed into the Giardini of the Venice Biennale by way of a game of imagination conceived by Polish artist Tomek Sacilowski and curator Joanna Warsza. The Czech performance group Handa Gote invited spectators to travel in time with their musical performance, Mr. Roman created for an original footage of found Super 8 films documenting the life of an average Czechoslovak citizen from the sixties to the eighties.

PLACCC 2010 also presented two collaborative projects with local artists. Escape Route was the festival‘s opening event with 4 days of actions throughout the city where the „stage“ for the artistic interventions was the platform of a military truck and art was literally set into motion. Usedesign Project focused on the use of public space from a design and public art perspective, rather than a performative approach. The result was a series of participatory events, such as Urban Salon, Urban P.E. or the extremely popular Silence-o-mat.

In 2011 PLACCC is back in Budapest to show that the city is more than a setting or a stage, it is an inexhaustable source of inspiration and play.

Come, re-discover and enjoy.