wildwuchs Festival Basel
Making culture accessible
Swiss Theatre Award 2018
wildwuchs has been presenting international art and culture at the Kaserne and other venues in Basel since 2001, experimenting with new forms of dance, performance and theatre and enabling people from all walks of life to participate actively in the city’s cultural scene. Until 2013, the festival focused on works created or performed by artists with a physical or mental disability. Sibylle Ott, co-founder and artistic director until 2013, received the City of Basel Culture Award for her work in 2009. In 2013 she was succeeded as director by Gunda Zeeb, previously a dramaturge at the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee. Under her leadership, the festival broadened the scope of its programme, and now concentrates increasingly on wider issues such as ageing in our society, interculturality and social exclusion. Since 2016 wildwuchs has carried the Kultur Inklusiv label, which includes making all its productions accessible to people with disabilities and using simple language on its website and in the programme.
The biennial wildwuchs festival aims to be a mediator of encounters between artists and audiences; between people affected by issues and those who are interested in them. It produces projects that offer equal opportunities for artistic creativity to all and enable cultural inclusivity amidst diversity. Together with the ORME Festival in Lugano, BewegGrund in Bern and Out of the Box in Geneva, wildwuchs is a partner festival of the Migros Culture Percentage integrART project. Its themes have included “wir stören” (“we disrupt”) in 2013, “wir übernehmen” (“we take over”) – on the theme of responsibility – in 2015 and “Innen und Aussen” (“Inside and Outside”) in 2017, when it also made a guest appearance at the University Psychiatric Clinic and produced projects on site with professional artists.
«Das wildwuchs Festival Basel ermöglicht Begegnungen zwischen Leuten mit ganz unterschiedlichen Besonderheiten. Diese Besonderheiten werden hier von Einschränkung oder sogenannten Behinderungen zu Fähigkeiten, zu Talenten, zur Chance auf eine besondere Sichtweise auf das Leben und die Welt. wildwuchs schafft so nicht nur den Zugang zu einer bestimmten Art von Kultur für Leute, die sonst nicht daran teilhaben könnten, sondern das Festival schafft Zugang für Menschen in der Mitte des gesellschaftlichen Normalitätsspektrums zu Perspektiven, die ihnen sonst meist verwehrt blieben. wildwuchs erfüllt so mit beeindruckender Konsequenz, Beharrlichkeit und Selbstverständlichkeit die nützlichste Funktion von Kultur überhaupt.»
Nicolette Kretz, Jurymitglied
