Micro-practices for a New Gentleness is a part of the Performance Studies International series of 2021 summer events, collectively titled Constellate, and a part of the Neighborhoods series. This workshop is led by Adelheid Mers.
With this project, we want to build an instrument for good conversation. Now online, it is again a prototype. The project revolves around small group conversations that are co-facilitated by a group of users, with the help of a score, through a set of art objects, or when online, their images that may be uploaded as Zoom backgrounds.
The images are part of a matrix of premises (what this score is based on), which spawned rules (directions for the players) that may be enacted through techniques (ways to play this score). This matrix was developed with a group of artists and musicians, through an emergent process. We arrived at the matrix by thinking about how our ways of making sense are shaped by the paradigmatic categories of being, knowing and doing. In this way, we are examining values inherent in the arts-based paradigm we want to work with.
Micro-practices for a New Gentleness, was named after diagram artist and philosopher Félix Guattari, who in The Three Ecologies asked to “organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices.” Consisting of 18 verbal prompts organized in six triplets, the Diagrammatic Instrument is to be activated by facilitators in a workshop setting, to support carefully focused conversations. Each verbal prompt is associated with a physical posture, shown by a 3-d printed figurine that participants can hold in hand and enact if desired. Our perspectives emerged from practicing and assessing critique in the US art school environment, where it is a central and multi-form pedagogic ritual.
Micro-practices for a New Gentleness was proto-typed at the Vilém Flusser Archive in Berlin as part of the Transmediale Vorspiel series (January 2020), and performed among other places at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (February 2020).
Adelheid Mers
Session Three
Sunday, August 15, 2021, 12pm - 1pm CDT
Platforms: Zoom and Google Docs
With With Jazmin Llana, Ella Perry-Davies, Peggy Pierrot, Nesrine Khodr, Tatyana Scott, Justice Henderson and Haley Bergeson.
Participants selected as topic "What does it mean to govern?" and following from that, asked "What does it mean to take on responsibility and to organize?" What are the roles of a governor and the governed? By thinking about their collective feelings of powerlessness, participants concluded the session with considerations of solidarity, and the form in which we want to be governed.
00:00:22 Neighborhoods Stream Introduction
00:04:12 Workshop introduction.
00:14:06 Establishing the proposition, the discussion topic
00:22:03 Arranging the space
00:24:27 Ceremonial opening of the conversation
00:26:10 Making the first remark
00:49:15 in closing: Did we encounter anything fresh?
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