Post/Pandemics | 2022
Post/Pandemics is a project initiated by radical_hope that started off with a couple of research questions before entering a 2-year process in the summer 2022, with the aim to come to a co-creation, with and by a yet unfixed group of people, in 2024.
What would a ‘post’-pandemic life look like?
How do we stay and act in it?
How do we understand it?
And how do we read the prefix ‘post’ when it comes to misgovernment of the world and its resources?
Post/Pandemics wants to live with and up to a reality where there is no 'post'-climate change and only coping with the ongoing damage of the world's resources: investing in undoing, re-learning, radically questioning everything and researching how life can be joyful while consuming and exploiting less. (Paradoxically this discourse is all in the air and at the same time not really addressed by any media -- something that makes sense, as un-commodities don't sell.)
* How can we rethink together our collective well-being and how can this rethinking become a(n artistic) creation-process?
After a pre-trajectory, Summer Refuge (August 2022 @De Markten, Brussels) Post/Pandemics adopted a seasonal work rhythm. Until December 2023 radical-hope sets up so-called Refuges at various locations where people can meet 'by chance': open spaces for which Heike Langsdorf and Simone Basani initiate changable circumstances to engage in a variety of (artistic) practices or just hang out.
Rather than using calls for participation, selection processes, or strategies to ensure diversity or exclusivity, Post/Pandemics prefers to rely on chance in inviting people into a process of exploration: an exploration of what happens when we do NOT obsessively search for solutions to problems, achievements, results, or umtimate alternatives to the status quo. Freed from the pressure to produce the aforementioned, we might find ways to live satisfying life/s...
In 2024, a choreographed conversational space will be created with those people who would like to engage in a more intense collaboration with each other. The work resulting from this last phase of the process will then invite a wider audience.
The Summer- and Winter Refuge explored the question of how a group becomes a group, how a group meets other groups, and how the concept of social integration is itself a highly questionable one: How can one counter the assumption that there is such a thing as a clear-cut society to which the other must conform?
The two Spring Refuges came to question how (as a yet unfixed group of people) we negotiate the space/s we find ourselves in? Figuring this out in practice instead of through merely theoretical speculation, an understanding of what we can mean or not mean for eachother could slowly develop and lead to next questions: What is there and always already available for us? How can we hold together the things that hold us together? How do we read the traces surrounding us, left by ourselves or others?
To keep in touch with each other in-between those Refuge periods, small Re-gatherings
are organized together with Alice Ciresola. These meetings are held to
present and discuss little fabrications – we call them documentations –,
co-created (during or in-between the Refuge periods) by some of the
people who participated.
* Refuges
Summer Refuge: 1/8 - 1/9 * 2022 @De Markten/BXL
Winter Refuge: 30/1 - 17/2 * 2023 @KAAP/Brugge Spring Refuge I: 13/3 - 7/4 * 2023 @De Markten/BXL Spring Refuge II: 8/5 - 28/5 * 2023 @Buda/Kortrijk
Fall Refuge Intensive Weeks: TBC * 2023 @De Markten, @LINK/BXL
* Re-gatherings
04/11/2022 Unveiling of Vivre Sa Vie by Charif Bendriss
14/12/2022 Projection of Image-Loop by Mira Verstraeten & the three kids & Playing of Textures, a soundtrack by Ivan Azazian.
03/07/2023 projections of images by Mira Verstraeten, Tomas Tytgat, Bilal Kamilla Arnout, Charif Bendriss, Jonas Verbeke and others & Unboxing Spring Refuge II -- group reading of accumulated / collected traces.
production :
radical_hope
coproduction :
De Markten/VGC Brussels, BUDA, KAAP, Forsitia, Flemish Community
initiation, choreograpy, mediation :
Heike Langsdorf
initiation, dramaturgy, production :
Simone Basani
assistance, communication, mediation :
Alice Ciresola, Liselore Vandeput
practitioners (Spring Refuges) :
Amina Saadi, Johanne Mortgat Shan, Noah Geistlich, Joan Somers-Donnelly, Katya Ev, Mira Verstraeten, Laura Oriol
participants (chronological order) :
BeeBee-lal Kamilla Arnout, Charif Bendriss, Siham Swaileim, Anne-Claire Kelam Epse Masso Mika, Saloua Achabouch, Johanna Jacobs, Mira Verstraeten, Elisabeth Ida, Ivan Azazian, Bieke De Bie, Nora Bajram, Marie Louise Ruth, Dumitru, Hilde Van Geel,
... :
Sandrien Bilterest, Joke Flo, Tomas Tytgat, Vassilios Vassileris, Soro, Michel, Miguel, Chehri, Carine De Backer, Soph, Veronica Juliana Schmalz, Giulieta Cortez