The Zagreb Shadow Casters project has recently concluded its first phase within the frame of the first Zagreb International Urban Festival that was held the last week of July. The festival inaugurated urban performing in the city of Zagreb and hosted over 20 participants from worldwide (http://www.urbanfestival.inet.hr). As Shadow Casters is a long-term project that will evolve in various world cities and in various forms, Zagreb Shadow Casters will be fully developed for next year’s edition of the festival. This year’s edition was thus the frame for the Shadow Casters workshop as preparation and grounding of the research. An international competition was sent out and over 30 candidates applied.

Envisaged as a time-space structure that, in the first phase, took the form of creative laboratory, Zagreb Shadow Casters evolved into a complex event. During the two July weeks in Zagreb, the participants of the Shadow Casters workshop delved into the exploration of the city, an endeavour of psycho-topography that always began and ended at the same point: themselves. They were nine in the beginning, they concluded as seven. They were of different generations and different artistic background, experience, interests and geographic origins: England, Italy, Venezuela, Bulgaria and Croatia. They were a mixture of total strangers to Zagreb, born Zagrebians who left and became estranged and natives who spent all their lives in the city. The workshop was the intersection point that joined the curiosity for the project that opens questions of individual and collective identity reflected in the multi-faceted mirror of the city.

For two weeks, Bill Aitchinson, Angelo di Bello, Ana Husman, Zhana Ivanova, Jasen Jakic, Irina Karakehayova and Carla Tommasini shared the living space that was the starting point of their research but also the site of research in its own right. Conducted and directed by Shadow Casters guides, the research consisted of learning and creating. It involved the usage of tools in the domain of new media, various forms of dilating and altering perception, challenging the notions of inner and outer mapping, questioning of the sensation of time and space. These were, in turn, translated into performing actions.

The result was a series of presentations that interwove Web site navigation, digital videos and intimate performances. The spectators were faced - or involved - with seven lines, seven identities of Zagreb Shadow Casters, that formed a different kind of map of the city: one that is forged out of the intensity of experience and the energy of intention.

The Zagreb workshop initiated a one-year preparation period for next year’s Zagreb Shadow Casters project that will involve over 50 locations, over 100 participants in an intricate symbiosis of Web and physical navigation.

Shadow Casters will be launched in Bologna in the form of the international workshop, as part of the third edition of International Urban Festival «Stagione di Caccia» (www.dsnet.it/stagionedicaccia/), in December 2001.

For more information about project «Shadow Casters – Bologna» and International Urban Festival «Stagione di Caccia 2001» (Hunting Season 2001) write to stolpnik@iperbole.bologna.it