Photo by Andreas Ackerup

International Festival: Marten Spangberg & Tor Lindstrand, Stockholm, 2007

Photo courtesy Marten Spangberg & Tor Lindstrand

Taxinge Piazza at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, August 2006

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The word “if” is pure speculation. It communicates contingency and chance, and it never makes any promises. It is also the acronym for a Swedish performance duo named International Festival. Their perfume, hand-bottled by their factory of two, stealthily filled the theater, clung to the audience’s hair and coats as they left, and soon evaporated, leaving no trace. This was IF’s performance.

Their explanation of it, which sums up most of their projects, was to think of performance “not as turning off the light and all looking in the same direction, but rather turning on the light and letting theater be everywhere.” In other words, letting theater be pervasive, like perfume.

Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg began collaborating as International Festival in 2004 but have worked together on and off since the early 1990s. Moving fluidly among performance, video, and architecture, academic theorizing and pure entertainment, International Festival have brought a cotton-candy machine into the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven to shoot sugary pink floss up to the ceiling, created a temporary kitchen at Berlin’s House of World Cultures, turned a parking lot into a public piazza at the Tensta Konsthall outside Stockholm, made several videos (After Pollock, 2005, features a split screen of Jackson Pollock drip-painting on one side, while Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 chimpanzee gleefully pounds a skeleton with a bone in slow motion on the other), and started a publishing house and even their own school, called the International Festival University, which was hosted by the Van Abbemuseum last fall.

International Festival are meant as a flexible and somewhat generic brand that can define anything they choose to do (some of their videos toy with shiny versions of their logo, they created an IF font, and their mission statement contains the declaration that they are “more the real thing than Coke”).

They evidence a spirit of collaboration and participation, understood by them as “open-source” events—not a surprising term for artists who rely heavily on blogs and websites like Flickr and YouTube as a means of distribution. But their marketing campaign is not meant to be commerce friendly; none of their distributed products are for sale (bottles of perfume turned up briefly on eBay, against the artists’ wishes).

Over the past couple of years, IF have developed what they call, bafflingly, a “kind of Martha Graham work combined with a Lion King style.” And even the moniker International Festival is sly; the celebratory tone is tinged with critique. How many international festivals are there these days? And what is their purpose—are they just more spectacle in a world of spectacle?

In developing new projects, they draw from their respective fields—Lindstrand is a practicing architect and editor of Merge, a Swedish magazine on music, theory, and new media, while Spangberg is a performance artist, curator, and choreographer.

International Festival’s first commissions began with simple and subtle acts of dispersal, like that of the IF perfume. Invited to participate in Berlin’s dance festival Tanz im August in summer 2004, they decided to create a welcome gift for the staff and performers, a complimentary tote bag filled with soap, music, readings, temporary tattoos, flip-flops, and DVDs. Their antic generosity continued later with the distribution of 25,000 white plastic bags printed with the International Festival logo to theaters throughout Europe.

The bags extended the performances, carrying theater into the streets and into people’s homes, while also including the audience in the process of distribution—a fundamental aspect of IF’s projects. As IF wrote in an e-mail, “We can’t just bring theater into the street—that’s the same story, so we just bring theater with us . . . or make the street a theater marked International Festival.”