Festival

La sourvie n'est pas simplement ce qui reste,
mais la vie la plus intense possible"

Jacques Derrida

“What point is the night?” What future is going to be like in the aftermath of the crisis? If it is true that 2011 will see the situation picking up, as we all wish, how will society, consumption habits, business-doing change and people imaginaries in the middle term?? Are we really walking past the present paralysis of consumption and production or shall we just get used to a permanent crisis scenario which equals an irreversible change? Does an aesthetic of crisis exist? What are the best strategies to survive the crisis?

These are some of the many questions a number of businessmen, designers, intellectuals and trend forecasters will try to answer on the first edition of the Capri Trendwatching Festival promoted by Capri Foundation with the art direction of Elena Marinoni.

Our age is a bumpy path, with strong accelerations and abrupt brakings: it is extremely difficult to predict what pattern postmodernity will take if we don’t get to decrypt the signals the present is already giving out about the future. We can do that through a collective intelligence who can ask themselves the right questions as to the future present working on different and yet complementary points of view.

The mission of the second edition of the Capri Trendwatching Festival is to chart new phenomena which are relevantly impacting the relationship between consumers and production: in particular, consumption shows an increasing sobriety, willing or not, and widespread forms of advanced associationalism grouping consumers together, triggered in the last decade by social networks. From crowdsourcing to crowdbuying, from solopreuning to the new frontiers of cooperative production, from a new dialectics between luxury and low cost to a redefinition of the poor and the rich increasingly affecting our country, all the way to the turn of “smart grids” and the new advanced forms of retail and design, where innovation beats the crisis and new opportunities emerge both for consumers and business people.

For three days, Capri - a place par excellence for a learned and erudite reflexion, a space for imagination and intellectual design – will be the ideal meeting point for anybody who will want to discuss the present to sketch the outlines of the future.

The syllabus features a series of lectures held by big names standing out on the international scene.