Hotel rooms, shopping centres, factories... Functional places are not considered places of interest. They are to be found in every city, and they are what make cities inhabitable as such. These instantly recognizable places live parallel existences around the world, each modelled on similar rules but displaying a local face.

For “Ciudades Paralelas”, Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi invited artists to devise interventions in public spaces. As observation stations for situations, eight projects make stages out of public spaces used every day, and seduce the viewers into staying inside that space long enough for their perception to change: Plays that make you subjectively experience places built for anonymous crowds.

Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw and Zurich were the first cities for this portable festival. In every following festival city the projects will be re-contextualized and staged with local performers.