Urban Dilemmas. Parallel City 2023

Urban Dilemmas is the framework for experimentation, growth, reflection and debate through which the CiviCultura movement responds to the city from 2021 to 2024. In the form of interventions, public theatre coagulates micro-communities, activates them civically and builds reconnection models through dialogue between different actors from the Iosefin, Fabric and Elisabetin neighbourhoods.

CiviCultura organises debates (City Talks & Civic Streams) as a reflection, an experiment with models of civic mediation and multi-modal informational flows or examples of good practice.

The issues concerning citizens, communities, the city, and Europe are the main themes around which the program’s two components are built: The Parallel City and City Talks & Civic Streams.

Parallel City means itinerant theatre that spectators and passers-by experience together with the actors in the movie-like setting of the city. The fictional theatre is based on field research, an experience through which we all come to see known and forgotten places and see each other and others with different eyes. Once revived, curiosity and attachment to all these elements will motivate us in the reconstruction of the communities we build.

The Parallel City - Iosefin (2021) focused on parallel worlds and how they coexist in different times. The Parallel City - Fabric (2022) focuses on parallel dreams and how they can interfere with each other. The Parallel City - Elisabetin (2023) offers a concrete opportunity to create communion in the present, through proximity, dance, and meeting.

The third show in the Parallel City cycle aims to continue and conclude the artistic mapping of the city of Timisoara, this time in the Elisabetin neighbourhood. Itinerant performance route, curated party and time travel, the Parallel City - Elisabetin combines the artistic means used in the previous two shows, developing them in a new and unique combination.

This project is part of the national cultural programme "Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in the year 2023" and is funded by the City of Timișoara, through the Center for Projects.