The second biennial festival of industrial culture Betrib 2023, will take place this year in the Hg Smelting Plant of the Idrija Mercury Heritage Management Centre on September 29th and 30th, 2023. This year's central theme of the festival will be the "redundant".
The Betrib industrial culture festival is an interdisciplinary festival that celebrates Idrija’s industrial culture, strengthens the culture of pioneering and research, weaves bonds of comradeship and solidarity, and interweaves the old with the new.
The festival takes place in Idrija, which in the 500-year history of mining, has developed into a town with special habits and customs that are preserved even though the mine closed its doors several decades ago. As part of the Betrib festival, we are addressing the people of Idrija as the unique, special, inventive and creative people that they are.
With the Betrib 2023 festival, we are putting Idrija culture in the foreground, enriched by a centuries-old tradition of work and industry that lives on even today. But is that really the case? With the festival, we ask ourselves questions about the future of industrial culture at a time when the operations in the industry are changing again.
With the changes in the industry, is everything becoming redundant? With the industrial revolution in the 19th century, farmers felt that they served their turn, 20th-century industrial architecture felt discarded, and we feel irrelevant in the 21st century when ChatGPT writes better essays than most high schoolers or when he is more creative. And yet... every abundance creates a new scarcity; there is never a shortage of work, and no one is truly redundant; we just have to adapt. Will we?
With conversations, exhibitions, artistic and creative content, and a musical program, we will answer questions about the future of industrial culture and ask about the usefulness of objects, spaces and ourselves. New experiences will find their place in the not-yet-renovated premises of the Smelting Plant, at the once-last stop on the mercury extraction route in Idrija.
More on the website of the festival: https://www.betrib.si/
The program of the Betrib industrial culture festival is prepared in cooperation with local partners: CUDHg Idrija
The project is co-financed by the European Capital of Culture program GO! 2025 Nova Gorica Gorizia
