practice/topics:
performative practice: performance/lecture, 2 performers, lecture/dialogue, movement/choreography, use of noise/field recordings, adjustable to most environments (indoors/outside – depending on the context, the work can involve more lecture, movement or noise), welcome participatory approach
key topics: vitalizing dynamics of protest, molecular revolution, object-oriented politics, schizoanalysis, pluralism, linguistics, entaglement, bottom-up confederalism, experimental therapy
statement:
We are keen on bringing to light the micro-political, steadfast nature of the concepts of protest, ideas of anarchism, bottom-up confederalism and their ties to vitalist, speculative realist takes on the world.
Revolutionary thinking is a vibrant state that constantly shapeshits from concrete to abstract: it can be linked to a care for concrete humble and resilient entities (from the oppressed/ignored/forgotten people, social classes, minorities to overlooked/exploited nature and to objects that are to be discriminated/pulverized in the name of mindless, trampling capitalist accumulation).
At the same time revolutionary thinking can be linked to an abstract, speculative and pluralist reading of the world, where through constant becomings/symbioses and confederal assemblages, entities (human, olive tree, curious dust speck) refuse subjugation through a protest of withdrawal and avoid falling prey to totalizing categorization. Thinking of concrete steadiness and abstract flows, we might talk of unpredictable speeds akin to slow drones and fast grinds, going astray from under a totalizing mid-paced beat.
We propose a lecture/performance which turns the idea of “assault” on its head, pushing the conflict dynamic toward thwarting and loosening of the attacking mechanisms. The overthrowing of violent dialectic takes place through taming which, in fact, submerges competition. When instead of lethal weapons, ideas, hotbeds of odd somatic movements, concrete sounds are the ones getting intricated – the frame becomes one that instills deterritorialization for peace and enthusiastic vitality (an eternal state of becoming-revolutionary in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). The war emerges as dance, weapons work with the harmless and creativity within the pragmatic-aesthetic space of art.
We use tactics of entaglement such as pluralist etymology to see how things can engage in surprising assemblages of bizarre renewed solidarity, far removed from the hierarchical, rigid language of the totalitarian power machines. Etymologically, the noun protest can be understood as a Latin compound of three roots related to: the preposition pro, the numeral three and the verb to stand or to stay. From this we gather that real protests always involve an (earlier) ignored, excluded third, from the oppressed people, to activists, to wet cardboards and punctured flags.
Object-oriented thinking has it that the interraction between things occurs through the mediating environment of a third object. A protest gathering can be regarded as a third object: It can mediate the relation between entities that take part in it – just as the common space can model and be modeled by the commoners. Everyday objects – that which is ejected in front of us, things which are without movement, have a certain grace within stillness. We can think of the steadfast character of picketers (protesters) which comes from the word picket – a stake driven into the ground to form a fence. Solidarity occurs through paying attention to nearby entities of the commoning space. Various acts of looking, observing, spectating and staring point to relations of light, gathering, care and steadyness which all support a vitalist, inclusive approach to the environment. We can remember that concepts like witness and martyr are etymologically related in many languages underlined by the act of seeing and ultimately caring for each other and being able to live within difference.
Rethinking the shock of the genocidal context of Palestine (also, the war in Syria/attacks of Rojava and the Tishreen Dam, the Sahrawi refugees fleeing the occupation and other equally worrying events), we bring in a transversal, that is atmospheric and ethical ways, bits from the book “The Palace of the Two Hills” (“Les palais des deux collines”) by the franco-palestinian writer Karim Kattan. As a result of the literary undertone within the lecture/performance, language registers mingle while keeping autoritharian wooden vocabulary at bay. Oppression constantly threatens both visible materiality and the abstract one (language, image, sound). In line with the thought of Felix Guattari, philospher-therapist-activist, we regard discourse as action that transforms social, political/micro-political and molecular space. Artistic, protesting, activist endeavor thus contains an eco-sophical core: both ecological and philosophical at once.
Through this performance/lecture we try to account for rhizomatic means of transforming the materiality of the environment/the materiality of the psyche (the invisible). We work with poetry as an ethical guide (the kurdish word for guide – “rêber” meaning either the front/face or the bearer of the road is a known term, important for the liberating struggles in Kurdistan) or, in the words of the anarchist-philospher Franco Berardi, as a guide of breathing in a world flanked by limiting absolutisms.
The theoretical figures which catalyze our work have a deep activist background and a preoccupation for concrete political realization. Our performative practice touches upon alternative-institutional thinking, that is not-capitalist and based on collective policies, at the same time deeply concerned with care for singularities and reaching consensus. We can remember entities such as The Vincennes University, the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde, the activities of autistic children guided by the thinker-educator Fernand Deligny in the Cevennes mountains in France, and so on. New alliances, to use the words of Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, are daring alternatives to redundant capitalism – they are possible as we imagine them and put them in practice with trust and solidarity. This performative lecture discusses protest as thinking-together. It can vitalise work beyond utilitaristic purposes. The living insinuates itself and implodes on small inter/spaces through hesitating, lit verbalizing, from affects which do not subjugate.
The performative pieces we are working on can be described both as object-oriented and as event-oriented. The works are very much about care and empathy for the nooks and cracks of the venue – getting their voices re(in)volved through concrete sound making, poetry or choreography. A common point of interest of the performative practices we’ve been developing and a Balkanic Anarchist Bookfair would be our fondness of odd-time signatures (usually applied in sound making, coreography and maybe speech) which are also specific to the traditional hardcore folklore of the region. The use of odd rhythms can be perceived as endless toying with time-space units to build a progressive, ever-changing structure, able to accommodate various entities in the consesus reaching process. Also, the performative works are about being in space of freedom where audience members can perform for themselves.
At the same time the work is movement/event-oriented where spontaneous gestures shift from trajectories to barely visible assemblages: flimsy weapons conjured from the air guide the bodies of the performers, dizziyng polyrhytmical walking of the performers and so-called assaults between them: starts and stops embody a reversed guerrilla of gentleness.