Ticino Is Burning (TIB) is an evolving process.

Following their experience at PREMIO SCHWEIZ, a number of Ticino artists, sharing the fact that they felt alone during the competition because no institutional partner from Ticino was present to support them, decided to initiate a dialogue with each other. Together they shared what they perceived as a common sense of isolation, reasoning about what it meant to exist as artists in a small territory, geographically and linguistically separated from the rest of the country. That is why the primary urge was to learn, to expand boundaries, beliefs and at the same time challenge certain certainties.
Thanks to the research support received from Pro Helvetia in 2020, TIB began to exist.

The artists of TIB perceive themselves as a movement because they are literally on the move, traveling all over Switzerland to meet theatre directors, artists, people connected to institutions and the world of culture, starting with the simplest thing: having a coffee and getting to know each other, in a language that is not necessarily their mother tongue and without any self-promotional aims.

At the beginning, the TIB artists described their desire to act in Switzerland with the title "one year of fire", a sort of revolutionary flame, which prompted them to touch upon various themes: multilingualism; the lack of space; the role and functioning of cantonal cultural policy; the professionalisation of the sector; the relationship with institutions as local artists; isolation; geographical difficulties... in short, a great cosmoschaos of many things with the desire of going through them all! During the meetings held in the first year while traveling, each of these themes, sometimes more, sometimes less, were touched upon, discovered, brought to light, getting an overall better knowledge of the whole picture. As time went by, however, the artists of TIB naturally realised that their common denominator was not so much wanting to solve the problem as questioning and wondering about it: through questions, which have the power to open and not to close, the problem is transformed, just by the fact that one starts talking about it. None of the artists in TIB are anthropologists, sociologists or champions of justice; there is no desire for institutional, market or territorial analysis. Rather, TIB says “yes, there are voids”, recognising their value and the inevitable immediate non-resolution; the inevitable indefiniteness. Therefore TIB is driven by the need to create and invite continuous fuses, ignitions and stimuli through questions that act and transform.
Through dialogue, exchange and going beyond, TIB moves through multiple creative forms that are the effect (and not the goal) of sharing, collaborations and awareness received from third parties during its process.

At the same time, the members of TIB themselves try to continue with their main work: making Art, the essence of which is inevitably influenced by this constantly changing process.