(2019)
"Doing things" has its origins in an attempt to attentively 'inhabit' performance as a certain material-semantic situation. We direct our attention towards the very act of communication, rooted in materiality and dynamic networks of impersonal affect. It offers potential for playful reorganization of the structures in which we function as social beings and allows to follow material, affective, sensual rationality.
"Doing things" is primarily a meeting. During the process people from different (artistic) fields, operating within different cultures and infrastructures of (artistic) work meet. We build common ground through the very engagement in the collaboration, commitment to the work, spending time together, sharing space, building understanding.
We anchor ourselves in the sense of our bodies as the primal experience of every living being. We lean on the fragility of improvisation which exposes us to the unknown and impersonal affect that grounds us and brings the notion of ‘having place’.
"Doing things" is about this moment, when I am in a foreign place, sitting and drinking tea, observing, trying to dissolve myself in what surrounds me to build new relations, to find acceptance. It is about this moment when I am at home with some people that I don’t know well. When they are around I am tensed. I am repeating things, like standing up and looking at the oven, then coming back to have my tea, feeling the awkwardness of all tiny movements, then standing up again...
Within the performance we expose ourselves and we expose one another in continuous flux. Every activity potentially is preparing space for the other to thrive. It is about being generous, it is about being baroque and mundane, it is about acceptance.
The material that we work with is the material we consist of. It is getting distorted, obscured, and augmented. We learn from dismantling the techniques that we mastered, our crafts, disciplines, our abilities, routines, and behaviours. We learn from repeating and pausing, attending to the details and gut feelings. We withdraw from the endless database of our bodies.
It is a part of the practice to acknowledge various strata and matters constituting our tangible-selves. Microbiome, chemicals, bioplastic, an inflexional system of the native language, hours spent sitting on the chair, several ways of bending over, the impulse to look immediately at the source of the noise,….
It is the labor of moving between different scales embedded within us, trying to embrace the whole complexity of the body. Using imagination and bodily empathy, we can tune into the planetary level and feel the continuous expansion of matter, or the cellular level and feel the oxygen particle penetrate the cell membrane. How does tuning into these processes affect the pace and quality of unbuttoning the shirt, singing the national anthem at a school assembly, explaining the complicated visa application procedure,…?
This work is based on a deep bodily conviction that thoughts, meanings, and rationalities emerge in a material world and can be transformed by engaging with the matter.
Performers and visitors together form a collective body that carries out the work of fabulating - primarly by the fact of being enmeshed (physically and semantically) together.
It is a poetry created by an attentive and sensual co-inhabitance of the exhibition space. Within the performance, we consciously navigate the unruly gaze. Seeing with the flash, not looking at one another or looking back in the eyes, watching the watchers, observing carefully. It allows us to expose the material-semantic tensions, rifts, frictions between the various strata and components of the situation. It is a poetry of reverberating coincidence.
"Doing things" is primarily a meeting. During the process people from different (artistic) fields, operating within different cultures and infrastructures of (artistic) work meet. We build common ground through the very engagement in the collaboration, commitment to the work, spending time together, sharing space, building understanding.
We anchor ourselves in the sense of our bodies as the primal experience of every living being. We lean on the fragility of improvisation which exposes us to the unknown and impersonal affect that grounds us and brings the notion of ‘having place’.
"Doing things" is about this moment, when I am in a foreign place, sitting and drinking tea, observing, trying to dissolve myself in what surrounds me to build new relations, to find acceptance. It is about this moment when I am at home with some people that I don’t know well. When they are around I am tensed. I am repeating things, like standing up and looking at the oven, then coming back to have my tea, feeling the awkwardness of all tiny movements, then standing up again...
Within the performance we expose ourselves and we expose one another in continuous flux. Every activity potentially is preparing space for the other to thrive. It is about being generous, it is about being baroque and mundane, it is about acceptance.
The material that we work with is the material we consist of. It is getting distorted, obscured, and augmented. We learn from dismantling the techniques that we mastered, our crafts, disciplines, our abilities, routines, and behaviours. We learn from repeating and pausing, attending to the details and gut feelings. We withdraw from the endless database of our bodies.
It is a part of the practice to acknowledge various strata and matters constituting our tangible-selves. Microbiome, chemicals, bioplastic, an inflexional system of the native language, hours spent sitting on the chair, several ways of bending over, the impulse to look immediately at the source of the noise,….
It is the labor of moving between different scales embedded within us, trying to embrace the whole complexity of the body. Using imagination and bodily empathy, we can tune into the planetary level and feel the continuous expansion of matter, or the cellular level and feel the oxygen particle penetrate the cell membrane. How does tuning into these processes affect the pace and quality of unbuttoning the shirt, singing the national anthem at a school assembly, explaining the complicated visa application procedure,…?
This work is based on a deep bodily conviction that thoughts, meanings, and rationalities emerge in a material world and can be transformed by engaging with the matter.
Performers and visitors together form a collective body that carries out the work of fabulating - primarly by the fact of being enmeshed (physically and semantically) together.
It is a poetry created by an attentive and sensual co-inhabitance of the exhibition space. Within the performance, we consciously navigate the unruly gaze. Seeing with the flash, not looking at one another or looking back in the eyes, watching the watchers, observing carefully. It allows us to expose the material-semantic tensions, rifts, frictions between the various strata and components of the situation. It is a poetry of reverberating coincidence.