Engaging with immediate reality has been one of the defining paradigms of contemporary art and independent theater over the past twenty years. Documentary forms, performativity, site-specific works, and the exploration of biography, identity, and origin were among the diverse forms that artistically addressed life, everyday existence, and its exceptional circumstances.

Although the arts have always reflected reality, the decisive difference in this “irruption of the real” was the shift toward the non-fictional. The focus was now on the factual «real» – whether in belief in it, in questioning it, in actively shaping it, or in manipulating it. Since 2013, “It's The Real Thing” has examined these phenomena in various ways.

In recent years, this turn toward the real has increasingly led to a politicization of the arts. This is not surprising. It reflects the desire for collective change and renewal, a reaction to an increasingly turbulent world. In the process, art as a celebration of ambivalence and individuality has been increasingly questioned or interpreted as an outdated sphere of privilege. This is a dilemma that continues to occupy the arts. Doesn't the struggle for change also include the struggle for the opportunity to have one's own voice? May it be exalted, ironic, gentle, conservative, burlesque, polemical, tragicomic, or silent. Can we insist on the importance of the individual in times of great upheaval?

«It's The Real Thing» invites fifteen artists to an academy to delve into the world of such dilemmas during the festival.

At the invitation of «It's The Real Thing», Claire Dessimoz and Marcel Schwald will once again be leading the academy in this edition, as they did in 2019.