For the 24th edition of Gender Bender, we have imagined a festival that is POPOLARE: a popular festival. We are not interested in the distinction between high and low culture, but in a culture that helps us grow by reaching as many people as possible, sparking a shared conversation that everyone can take part in. What do we imagine when we think of popular art and culture? And what does “the people” – a collective identity so often reduced to a cliché in an age of rampant nationalism – desire, demand and lay claim to? What sustains it?

With “bread and roses”, the suffragettes and workers’ movements demanded the right to beauty alongside decent economic conditions. “Food for thought” describes ideas that nourish our understanding of the world and open up new horizons. And with “panem et circenses”, entertainment in ancient Rome is understood as a means of distracting people from the problems of society. Three perspectives that may seem close, yet are profoundly different: rather than offering answers, they reveal different ways of seeing the world, and different intentions.

So what do popular art and culture mean to Gender Bender? We want to create open and democratic opportunities for people to come together, encounter art and engage with one another, starting from the fundamental themes of our lives that are so often treated as taboos: desire, relationships, the vitality of our bodies and their mortality. To be POPOLARE, in this sense, is a radical choice: a determination to remain deeply engaged with the world and open to it.

The question, then, is not so much what is popular, but what we want to make popular.
Our proposal is to put the senses and sensations at the centre of our relationship with art: to remain open to what we feel, and to nourish ourselves through an experience grounded in perception – an accessible, embodied and genuine way of encountering art.

POPOLARE is, finally, also a verb: to populate. To populate public and artistic spaces means recognising everyone’s right to inhabit them and to keep filling them with vitality. By “public”, we mean what concerns us, not what belongs to us. From this starting point, we can truly cultivate an art and a culture that make us feel part of a people – a people in constant evolution, yet already inhabiting the present.

Gender Bender is an invitation to be there, many and different.

Mauro Meneghelli