If you build it, they will knock it down: Previewing PIFA 2018

If you secretly never lost your taste for knocking the tower down after you built it, you’re in luck. The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA) isn’t back until next year, but a special week of preview events is coming right up, including a giant hunk of cardboard architecture participants will build and tear down.

PIFA, a citywide extravaganza of the arts curated by the Kimmel Center and topped off in past years by a massive daytime party on Broad Street with everything from jugglers to dinosaurs, hits Philly for the fourth time. The fest debuted in 2011, then returned in 2013 and 2016. Details for PIFA 2018 are coming soon.

The centerpiece of PIFA’s preview week, running May 30 through June 4, 2017, will be an original 88-foot-tall Independence-Hall-inspired cardboard structure designed by French installation artist Olivier Grossetête, making his American debut in partnership with European artist network In Situ.

Philadelphians themselves will build it, and knock it down.

First, the Wilma hosts four days of three-hour Building Blocks Workshops (May 30 through June 2). They’re free and open to the public, though advance registration is required. Attendees will create the 1,400 cardboard sections of Grossetête’s The People’s Tower (it’ll take eight miles of tape).

Next, the public is invited to help assemble the “fantastical, epic, temporary” tower in Dilworth Park, with construction slated for June 3 from 9:30am to 6pm (come for any amount of time during the day). Finally, at 7pm on June 4, PIFA invites everyone back to Dilworth Park to smash the eight-story structure to the ground.

We can hope for fine weather, for the cardboard and the builders’ sake, and that the toppling isn’t too heartrending for anyone who labored at workshops to build the thing, but it will all no doubt add up to a singularly enriching communal meditation on the ephemeral nature of art.

Also on June 4, the Kimmel will host an Art in Public Spaces panel discussion at 2pm, featuring Mural Arts founder and executive director Jane Golden, Grossetête, and five other international arts leaders. They’ll grapple with the question of what actually defines public space and how presenting art there is different from mounting it in a traditional dedicated venue.