Festival Multiplicidade Returns to Rio de Janeiro Starting July 30th

By Chesney Hearst, Senior Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Festival Multiplicidade returns this week to Rio de Janeiro on July 30th and will include events held at Oi Futuro Flamengo, Planetario da Gavea and EAV Parque Lage through November 7th. Celebrating its tenth anniversary last year, this edition of the avant-garde festival, entitled, Multiplicidade 2025, will focus on the next ten years and the future intersections of art, music and technology.

“We’re thinking ahead, we are in 2025,” Festival Multiplicidade curator Batman Zavareze told The Rio Times. “We are an exercise in foresight.”

The festival will include live shows and performances, a launch of a special book celebrating the first ten years of the festival, and a free videomapping workshop and collaborative installation which will take place in partnership with Oi Kabum! Rio.

“Our review of the first ten years took place last year and now our mission is to look ahead ten years, so we are talking about the festival as if it were 2025 and we were celebrating twenty years of its existence,” said Zavareze. “It is a jump and so, a bit surreal, but there is nothing more absurd than living in this year of 2015.”

Emphasizing the theme of the future of art, music and technology, Multiplicidade 2025 will include many programs geared toward a younger audience. Bands Metatron and Codeclub will perform during the opening night on July 30th, with both groups featuring members aged fifteen through twenty.

During the previous ten editions, Festival Multiplicidade has welcomed over 700 artists and musicians including Atom™, Daedelus, Scanner, Tom Zé and Diplo.

Since the festival began in 2005, Zavareze said there were memorable moments during each edition including the “blackout of Naná Vasconcelos” in 2009 and group Chelpa Ferro performing with an orchestra conducted by Jaques Morelenbaum.

Zavareze stated that performances by Diplo, Daito Manabe, Cao Guimarães and Arnaldo Antunes filled him with pride and joy and that the move to include Parque Lage and the Planetário in addition to Oi Futuro Flamengo as event locations was a big step in the festival’s history as it helped create a new public perception of what the festival was and could become.

Speaking of the wisdom he gained during the previous editions, Zavareze said; “I learned to build legacy networks and connections with the participants of the festival, I learned to listen with generosity and to fight for ideas, to be the healer, but most importantly I learned to create a circuit that permeates, making our movement a ‘living culture.'”

“Art can exist on its own,’ Zavareze continued, “but the culture has to be nurtured and grown over the years with education, training and connections to the creative industry that moves millions in the economy. While there is spending on the consumption of superfluous goods, our investment is in the food of our souls, art. Today, we need to invent a new business model, a new type of management of cultural skills and the festival has much to contribute in this field by pointing in other directions, helping artists to think a step ahead to not fall in commercial traps.”

For more information about Multiplicidade 2025 and this edition’s events, see the official website.

What: Festival Multiplicidade 2015 ‘Multiplicidade 2025’
When: Opening night will take place on Thursday, July 30th at 6PM at Oi Futuro Flamengo, Rua Dois de Dezembro 63, Flamengo.
See here for additional events, event information and details including dates, times, addresses and entrance fees.