Neuropa Manifesto

Neuropa Manifesto has been the opening event of Europe City Milano, a festival that explores new ways to talk about Europe. The performance, held at BASE Milano in May 2019, has been conceived by Edoardo Mozzanega, and was composed by a session of live typing, the live painting of Neuropa’s flag (Nathalie Cohen), the real-time composition of the manifesto (Alex Piacentini) and a choreography that helped facilitating the event (Barbara Novati + volunteers). The experiment gave birth to a new European entity that gathered the audience's impetus, necessities and madness generating a new European narrative.

1 — LIVE TYPING

The performance started with the projection of an empty text file. Suddenly someone starts typing some words, the silence broken only by the noise of the keys coming from the speakers:

"Hi!"
"Are you there?"

The screen asked the audience to perform some simple movements like standing up, placing the hand on the chest, swapping places. Then it explained that we were about to make an experiment together and asks to fill in the form. This first part had the purpose to create a connection with the audience while leaving a degree of mystery and ambiguity.

2 — COLLECTING THE DATA

Each participant contributed three words or sentences answering these questions, corresponding to the three colours: grey (Europe is: talk about what is there), fuchsia (Neuropa is: imagine what isn’t there) and purple (Neuropa has inextinguishable faith in …: write something to fight for).

3 — THE MANIFESTO

After every participant filled in the form, the host officially opened the festival and invited the speakers on the stage. During their talks we started inputting the collected contributions using a custom software created for the event, so that the manifesto gradually composed behind the speaker's back with each sentence boldly projected full-screen when added. All sentences have been added exactly as indicated by the audience, without any filter or editing. The result is a an extemporary, spontaneous and playful collective Manifesto for Neuropa. At the same time the Neuropean flag has been painted using the same contributions.