2020 was our fourth year and it was unrolled in the shadow of the Corona epidemic. The activities have consisted of: residences, both organized by participants and under the auspices of Island Connect and finally a long row of free Corona residencies, we lay out in the spring – most of the projects ended with work-in-progress showings, most of these were intern for invited guests because of the restrictions Corona generated. Upstart of the frame project Klemensker Terra and the performances during Bornholm Culture Week. In return we had to cancel Artistic Entrepreneurship workshops and the scheduled TOFIC festival in addition “The People’s democratic Festival” was cancelled this year e.g. Corona.
BIRCA 2020 was characterized by Corona, but we opened our doors for the artists who really needed a place to work. We gave out ree Corona residencies. 27 different artists / groups with 46 adults and 5 children visited BIRCA in the spring. This meant more Danish based artists visited us – but with a considerable international tough. A lot of international actors live in Denmark, especially in Copenhagen. In this way the season meant we went deep -into performance art research and into the Danish performance art environment. At the same time, we created the first BIRCA Kids Residency, where we invited artist families with children to a special week – an initiative we are going to continue in the future.
In total 91 people have used BIRCA in 2020, professionally. 64 of these were women. It is a deliberate strategy as far as possible to support female performers in their development. 32 of the artists have had an international background and they came from the following countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Greece, Croatia, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Hungary, England, Italy, Spain, France the United States and Canada. This is quite a lot when you look at conditions this year when we have fought so much with Corona. It partly shows, how international a section we have because a lot of them live in Copenhagen. But we also have had artists travelling from abroad and extra work inviting them, so they were able to get into the country. This is especially applying to Island Connect in connection to Greece and Croatia, but we also had people coming from England, Norway and Sweden. Finally, we had an artist who was caught in Denmark when we closed the country down in March- she stayed a good while.
We had quite a lot of intern showings but also managed to show the performance SPOR, a train journey on foot four times with a total of 80 guests and a Bornholm Culture Week showing with in total 44 guests.
If you want to read the whole report to see what we did and who has been here – you can find the report here
