20 STORIES OF CIRCOSTRADA - CELEBRATING THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NETWORK: GETTING STRONG

An Article written by
Mike Ribalta
19 July 2024

FiraTàrrega became a member of Circostrada in 2012. At that time, the network had a lot of organisations working in circus, but there were also some very passionate members advocating for outdoor arts. We were one of them: part of why we joined was to help push outdoor arts up the agenda. It had been several years since the first FRESH CIRCUS in Paris, and a second edition was already being planned. For us, it was absolutely necessary that we also produce a FRESH STREET event as a major meeting place for the sector – and we wanted to do it in Tàrrega. The framework would be the FiraTàrrega international festival and performing arts market that takes place every second weekend of September in Catalonia. But how to go about it? The idea for that first FRESH STREET was to lay the foundation for future editions by giving, first, an overview of the street arts sector in Europe. Within the network we formed a working group that would work on organising and programming the event. The base of our discussions was to ask ourselves: What is the current state of outdoor arts? Where are we coming from and where do we want to go? We wanted to make the meeting a key moment to reflect on the past and start to build the future of the sector. The spirit of our working group was very positive, as we knew we all had to work together. But the discussions were also very intense — ranging from the concept of outdoor arts and who can be included in that term, to the details of which people, organisations, countries and examples should be invited and bene- fit from being able to represent themselves at the very first gathering for outdoor arts at a European and international level. As coordinator I had to be the bossy one, the person who had to close the debates in order to move things along. I said ‘sorry about that’ so often it became a catchphrase, which the team used to make a little fun of me (well deserved!). Outside of Circostrada as well, in a lot of ways that first FRESH STREET was an act of diplomacy. We had a lot to balance, playing between institutions from the different countries involved, and managing all the stakeholders it takes to pull off a large-scale event. We’d decided to spread the seminar itself between two cities – Barcelona and Tàrrega. Holding conversations with the city council in Barcelona made me realise the strength of being part of Circostrada, and how FiraTàrrega was becoming a flagship for the sector. FRESH STREET eventually took place over three days in September 2015. And in the end, after all the work that went into organising it, I barely participated. There was so much to do between the conference and the organisation of the regular festival that we had to split our team in two, one in Barcelona in charge of FRESH STREET and one in Tàrrega, welcoming the 900 delegates of that very special edition of FiraTàrrega. So I only saw the final wrap-up event on the last day of FRESH STREET. Still, looking back on it, I think we succeeded in what we set out to do: we gave an overview of street arts in Europe. We stated who we were, what we did. In the years that followed, outdoor arts faced many crises: the terrorism crisis, political crises, restrictions on public space, the pandemic. We had all these things that impacted our field very directly. But at least what we did in that first edition of FRESH STREET was we gathered ourselves together as a field. We started to make the links we needed to withstand these crises, because for the first time all the key players had come together, and that made us stronger.

Head of the Professionals department, FiraTàrrega, Spain