Unfixing the Atlas | 2024
Unfixing the Atlas is the 2024 co-creation stemming from the project/process Post/Pandemics (2022/2023) >>> read here more about this process <<<
(* a not too small space / surface and (min) 2 hours))
[ HISTORY:
This production is an extension of a long working process, in which the current team of creators got to know each other little by little. This performance grew out of the one Post/Pandemics project which took place in different places / cities throughout almost two years. Post/Pandemics started with the Summer Refuge (August 2022 at De Markten, Brussels), and surfaced each new season with a new 'refuge' in various locations. Places where people could meet casually. Open places for which Heike Langsdorf and Simone Basani designed ever-changing conditions for (artistic) practices, or to simply spend time.
No selection process was used for these meetings, or a participation call, or a strategy to be sure of diversity or exclusivity. Post/Pandemics simply invited people into a process of discovery: what happens when we do NOT obsessively seek solutions to problems, to achieve something, to get results, or progress,.... When those pressures fall away, we find ways to experience, reflect, think together, and this has a 'snowball effect'. Throughout the last 2 'refuges' there were a group of core participants, and a group of artists proposing things, going through the whole process. During the fourth refuge in Kortrijk (May 2023), these participants chose to co-create together, and that is now Unfixing the Atlas. ]
No selection process was used for these meetings, or a participation call, or a strategy to be sure of diversity or exclusivity. Post/Pandemics simply invited people into a process of discovery: what happens when we do NOT obsessively seek solutions to problems, to achieve something, to get results, or progress,.... When those pressures fall away, we find ways to experience, reflect, think together, and this has a 'snowball effect'. Throughout the last 2 'refuges' there were a group of core participants, and a group of artists proposing things, going through the whole process. During the fourth refuge in Kortrijk (May 2023), these participants chose to co-create together, and that is now Unfixing the Atlas. ]
How does it work?
Performers and visitors meet and move through an "atlas of traces"
(spatial elements, objects, people, memories, testimonies, recordings
(image, sound, text)), creating new paths. The world with which the
performance begins is thoroughly changed by the end ...
... and what is it that
we have brought about - together?
Unfixing the Atlas (UtA)
is also a kaleidoscopic conversation space, in which we look at the world as
an atlas of traces. Traces we are born into, traces we leave ourselves,
traces we must or want to relate to, and traces that guide our lives.
The conversation through all this material requires unbiased listening
to each other, to the things that surround us, to and through the
memories we live with.
An experience similar to an activated exhibition, UtA is an arrangement being constantly reread and shifted by the creators/performers and everyone present, including visitors. To avoid one particular reading and orientation emerging from the setup, the whole "performance" revolves around disconnecting the links and logics that keep emerging.
>>>
Participatory aspects of Unfixing the Atlas
Participation within the socio-artistic often still remains a precarious matter. Often "participatory" work loses itself in pronounced hierarchical distinctions between who "can" and who "cannot" make sweeping decisions. And often that divide runs between the initiating organizations and artists on one side, and the 'non-professional' participants on the other. There is a lively discourse in these woke times about the blind spots in institutional policies of access and participation, but often the scope of this discussion is limited to the ethics of invitation (to participants), but not extended in terms of organization, the choreography of time, space and the distribution of fees and materials, or also the administration and follow-up in between or afterwards. As a result, the participatory nature of many projects often remains one-sided and lacks a component of self-criticism. The ethical dimension sometimes suffers from appeasement, not really daring to take the radical consequences of its own assumptions.
radical_hope has tried again and again in the past to set up artistic projects in which the initiators and participants would merge with each other, a kind of 'makeshift communities' (Jeroen Peeters, 2015, Makeshift communities of practice, Notes on Sitting with the Body 24/7 by Langsdorf and radical_hope). These projects succeeded in creating a temporary community from an artistic vision. The aesthetic and ethical component was important, but the process often did not allow the
decisions around this manifestation of what was happening in the process to be open to all participants, not just the initiators.
The Post/Pandemics process and now the co-creation UtA therefore happen "in memoriam" of Mount Tackle (2016/17 & 19). Mount Tackle asked pointed questions about what an object might mean in the context of a specific space, background, interpretive framework, and position. The resulting anti-aesthetics certainly had a critical component, and to some extent also undermined the aesthetic preferences of the creators, and it also partially relinquished control over the direction of the audience, but the process was still not radically participatory (during the creation process and the performance itself) where the form of the performance was concerned.
UtA becomes (thanks to the long pre-research and process of Post/Pandemics, a piece whereby the initiating artists, the supporting practitioners, and the so-called participants collectively create a space for interaction, in which they themselves develop their own form of performance, their own control mechanisms, and various aesthetics. This means that we are all challenged in our idea of "what looks good," and instead begin to weave with the threads spun throughout space and time.
UtA can be seen as an attempt to embrace what is not part of our vocabulary. What we don't expect to make or see. In this sense, UtA contributes to a world where we need to learn how to "recycle" old and no longer functioning positions of power into something that works again. Both energetically, socially, politically and also artistically/aesthetically. This means that, as artists, we do not proactively 'stage' 'material' (things/people/stories) but create the conditions for things, bodies and ideas to appear.
With UtA, radical_hope is committed to the question of how we can transform the so-called "ennobling" ambition of art into an art practice that truly takes into account society, the other, that which has not yet found a place in "culture". A society that should not be 'elevated' by art, but is simply what it is.* UtA wants to challenge and counter the idea of social harmony: a prosperous world can be one where nothing is ever sure of its place. For radical_hope, that starts with questioning our own place and position as artists, initiators, organizers and human beings. Especially in the workplace. (* Beste Bildungsburger by Rudi Laermans, rectoverso, 16 Feb, 2023)
With UtA, radical_hope is committed to the question of how we can transform the so-called "ennobling" ambition of art into an art practice that truly takes into account society, the other, that which has not yet found a place in "culture". A society that should not be 'elevated' by art, but is simply what it is.* UtA wants to challenge and counter the idea of social harmony: a prosperous world can be one where nothing is ever sure of its place. For radical_hope, that starts with questioning our own place and position as artists, initiators, organizers and human beings. Especially in the workplace. (* Beste Bildungsburger by Rudi Laermans, rectoverso, 16 Feb, 2023)
production, productional work :
radical_hope, Simone Basani, Heike Langsdorf, Liselore Vandeput
co-production, co-presentation, avant-premiere Brussels :
Kunstenwerkplaats, De Markten, nadine, LINK, NC Nekkersdael, Buda, Kaap
assisting with communication :
Alice Ciresola
with the financial support of :
Flemish Community
premiere Ghent :
KIOSK icw yet to be confirmed Ghent-partners
participants :
Charif Bendriss, Anne-Claire Kelam Epse Masso Mika, Carine De Backer, Diana, Elisabeth Ida, Marie Louise Ruth, Vincent
supporting practitioners :
BeeBee-lal Kamilla Arnout, Johanne Mortgat, Laura Oriol, Mira Vanderstraeten
additional practitioners :
Mattieu Hendrickxs, Ernst Maréchal, Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei, Fransien van der Putt
overall guidance, dramaturgy, choreography/conditioning :
Simone Basani, Heike Langsorf
additional performers/practitioners... :
joining later during the process...