We are witnessing how the funding for culture and the arts on the part of different European governmental instances, private foundations and organizations is being directed towards selected artistic projects and themes, which reflect the ideologies and tendencies of European politics.
“Fictive Situations” is a performative work, questioning the role of the artist and the arts funding system in the European society. he performer on stage is a metaphor for its own kind. Originally an artist engaged in contemporary dance, she is sitting on a chair with a handicapped body, performing her choreography using merely her facial muscles. Her facial expressions are being monitored by a camera attached to her head, while the images are analysed and processed in real-time. By moving her mouth she is triggering pre-recorded speech – a call for artistic projects and its thematic guidelines, launched by a European foundation for supporting the arts. By moving her eyes she is able to distort and modulate the speech signal – expressing the tiny bit of creative freedom within the framework set by the funding institutions. It is interesting to see how the descriptions of best practice examples of successful (funded) artistic projects match the thematic directives of particular calls for proposals
The creative ideas of artists and cultural producers are biased by the directives given in the particular project funding guidelines. In order to be able to work they must adapt their artistic interests to match the thematic focus set by the funding bodies. The result is that most artistic project actually do not have any serious correlation with the content they were supposed to deal with.
Thus, who are the artists? What do they do?

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