EX-EAST 
Festival
 

A temporary Eastern European experiment exploring one question:
How do we move forward when the world we believed in is gone?

Europe has no shortage of theatre festivals. Most follow a familiar pattern: artists arrive with finished productions, present their work, and move on to the next city a few days later.

EX-EAST begins somewhere else.

Today, Europe needs fewer places where art is presented and more places where it is created together with the people who live there. Places where encounter comes before performance.
That is why the EX-EAST Festival does not begin with a programme. It begins with a city.
With Magdeburg. More precisely, with Magdeburg Neustadt.

Its streets, courtyards, cafés, schools, parks, shops, community centres and neighbourhood initiatives become the festival's first stage. Not because public space is more spectacular than a theatre, but because this is where the questions that matter emerge.

How do people live together when they carry radically different memories of Europe? What does neighbourhood mean in a city shaped by biographies from Eastern Germany, Ukraine, Syria, Romania, Poland or Vietnam? What changes when people begin listening to one another before speaking about one another?

The invited artists do not arrive with finished productions. They arrive with years of experience. Many have worked in towns, villages and neighbourhoods across Eastern Europe, creating performances with people who had never imagined themselves on a stage. They work with documentary material, personal memories, music, film, architecture and everyday life. Sometimes their work results in a performance, sometimes in an installation, a film, a shared walk, or simply a relationship that did not exist before.

These practices are the starting point of the festival. Not because they can be transferred from one city to another, but because they open new ways of asking questions. We are interested in how artists in Chișinău, Lviv, Belgrade, Warsaw or Sofia build trust, make conflicts visible, and create situations in which people who rarely meet in everyday life begin a conversation.

For this reason, the invited projects are not presented as guest performances. They become the beginning of new artistic processes developed in Magdeburg together with local schools, associations, initiatives and communities. What these collaborations will become cannot be planned in advance. That uncertainty is not a weakness; it is the festival's method. The aim is not to execute a concept, but to create the conditions in which something genuinely new can emerge.
Moritzhof is not the centre of the festival. It is its point of departure. From there, EX-EAST unfolds across the city. Some works will be highly visible; others may remain almost invisible. Some will last one evening, others several weeks. Some will gather hundreds of people, others may bring together only two strangers for a conversation.

The success of the festival will not be measured by premieres or audience numbers. It will be measured by whether new relationships emerge, whether people begin to see their own neighbourhood differently, and whether, for a moment, art becomes something we take part in rather than simply consume.

EX-EAST grows from the conviction that Europe's future will not be decided only through political programmes or international summits. It is shaped just as much in neighbourhoods, schools, parks, marketplaces and the ordinary places of everyday life—where people with different histories learn to share the same space.

This is where EX-EAST chooses to work.

The artistic programme for the first EX-EAST Festival at the Moritzhof in 2028/2029 will be developed over the coming months together with international partners, artists and the people of Magdeburg Neustadt. The final programme will emerge through a shared process of research, dialogue and collaboration.

For us, a festival is not a finished event.

It is a way of imagining how we might live together in the future.

If you would like to share ideas, thoughts or proposals with the curators, 

we would be delighted to hear from you:

info@safespaceagency.org