Forecast is a program that offers artists and creative thinkers from anywhere in the world the chance to work with accomplished mentors toward bringing their projects to fruition. Forecast sets itself apart by inviting prominent architects, designers, curators, and artists to participate in a mentorship program for individuals from all backgrounds. Incepted by Freo Majer, the first edition of Forecast took part in 2015-2016.

Acting as Artistic Director, Freo Majer looks back at a career as a director and producer in European theatres, opera houses, and festivals; I have always been interested in the interaction of different trades and disciplines and the surprising and unpredictable nature of transdisciplinary cooperation. For me, opera and theatre were a fascinating playground where I could create friction between text, music, and scenic action and explore the distortions and doubts of human existence. Majer told us over email about how his formative experiences led to founding Forecast.

In his work as a director, Majer had to experience how inventive and liberal artistic work was often slowed down by bureaucracy and predetermined processes and formats in opera houses and theatres and, therefore, could be prevented from developing. The apparatus behind a production can be incredibly cumbersome and frustrating, and at some point, that made me ask: do I really want to contribute in my career to ensuring that cultural institutions, under steady mechanisms of bureaucratic administration, rigid conventions, and also the need of a permanent self-exploitation of the individual artist “spits out” a fixed number of premieres every year? I wanted to change that kind of alienation.

Majer told us that he had the impression that the institutional funding and realisation of artistic production only sometimes serves the creative process but rather often serves a market. However, as long as an artistic process is organised for outcome rather than as a legitimate and fully autonomous process per se, it will follow the conventions and limitations of what is already established and acknowledged and reproduce the same thoughts repeatedly. Forecast should do exactly the opposite: to give the individual creative exactly what he/she wants or needs while allowing him/her absolute freedom in all decisions. He says.

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