Paul Bargetto is an international theater director, dramaturg, festival producer, and teacher based in Warsaw, Poland. He is the President and Founder of Fundacja Teatru Trans-Atlantyk, a multidisciplinary independent arts organization in Warsaw producing original performances, cultural research, digital media, workshops, and international collaborations. Bargetto also works independently as a freelance artist focusing on contemporary dance, theater, and site specific performative installations. His work has been presented across Europe in numerous important festivals and venues and in China and the United States.
Before moving to Europe, Bargetto lived and worked in New York City, where he founded the theater company East River Commedia (1998-2010). Important productions with East River Commedia include Striptease and Out at Sea, Philosopher Fox and Serenade, The Magnificent Cuckold, and A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians. He also founded and directed the undergroundzero festival (2007-2014), a festival of experimental independent live arts presented in six incarnations at various venues throughout the East Village and Lower East Side, including PS 122, Collective:Unconscious, Clemente Soto Velez, and the Living Theatre. In 2005, Bargetto helped found the League of Independent Theater, an advocacy organization for independent theater in New York City, where he served on the board of directors and as the managing director of public affairs for five years.
Since the beginning of the full scale invasion of Ukraine, he has concentrated on working with Ukrainian theater and dance makers, as well as on numerous humanitarian initiatives. Recent credits include If I Had a Gun, I’d Take Them All Down, by Piotr Armionowski with Michael Rubenfeld, Every Minute Motherland, with the choreographer Maciej Kuzminski, International Agency for Ukraine!, with Piotr Armionowski, and Cossachka, a contemporary dance theater collaboration with Yuliya Lopata. Other important recent credits include Cantos at the Staatsballet Wiesbaden and Memoryhouse at Tanz Linz with choreographer Maciej Kuzminski, Album Karla Hockera and California with Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk and Teatr Trans-Atlantyk, Plateau, Fabula Rasa, and i, on the Verge of Humanity with choreographer Maciej Kuzminski, and Historie Mowione, a site-specific performative installation.
Artist Statement
Paul Bargetto (°1969, San Jose, United States) creates performances, photos and conceptual artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Bargetto wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
His collected, altered and own performances are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our own vulnerabilities. The artist also considers movement as a metaphor for the ever-seeking man who experiences a continuous loss.
His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By questioning the concept of movement, he absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
His works isolate the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. Paul Bargetto currently lives and works in Warszawa.
Paul Bargetto 