The Dramaturgical Ultimatum by Lina Persson

The dramaturgical ultimatum - staying with open-ended-ness 50% seminar of performative storyworlds a research project by Lina Persson For this seminar we will explore acts/practices as knowledge, the act as art, the university as a place for art making, storymaking together with the present time/place and working with narratives inside dominant story-worlds. In this artistic research project I create and embody imaginary storyworld premises in order to restructure how I perceive and react to my contexts, (within me find ways to resist dominant structures). The core of the project is the dynamic interplay between a growing fiction storyworld called NRE and the everyday life, how to interweave them through worldings*. I will try to demonstrate this in the seminar by interweaving the place/time/act of this seminar with the storyworld. The place is the University. The act is an ultimatum. The time for the 50% seminar is the present, a present that also contains a manifestation of a future, of an assumed endpoint, a "final seminar". But as this research aims to divert from such set manifestations of the future, aims to stay with an open-ended-ness, I have conditioned this assumed endpoint with an ultimatum that I hope could pave way for a more diverse array of narrative trajectories. In the light of this I want to remind you not to see this seminar as an event where results, what has been done up till now, will be disclosed. (that is shared here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1747846/1747796 ). But as a moment where we can in real-time, together explore how this research works, without the possibility of knowing beforehand what will happen. At the moment this attempted mapping is neither finished nor fully graspable to myself, but I am confident that more pieces of the puzzle will fall in place during the seminar. *WORLDING - A term from material feminist thought about making "cuts" in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world we inhabit. Worlding is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. The concept of worldings resonate with my artistic practice a lot, my main interests are in systems and “wholes”, the full range of things, from material and structural to epistemological and ontological. I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect each other. I see life and the world as a collective process, an ongoing narration. I tap into these ongoing narratives, make small contributions, deviate things a bit in order to shift the meanings. I use inner imaginary worlds to push my perspective on what actions are possible. Sometimes I refer to it as fanfiction.

References at the projects startingpoint https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1747846/1747849

Referenses & glossary added along the research journey (work in progress, list is unformatted)

Inefficient Mapping - A Protocol for Attuning to Phenomena, Linda Knight
Now, The Invisible Committee, 2017
https://www.iesalc.unesco.org/en/2022/06/02/reimagining-the-futures-of-higher-education/
Judith Butler, when gesture become event
Wetiko (Native American mythologies)
https://www.eauc.org.uk/eauc-led_science-based_target_guidance_and_veri
Storytelling: Its Many Forms - Empowering the Spirit, Learning Guide First Nations, Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium and Alberta Education
The New Metaverse & Women of Colour, Lisa Nakamura, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Liu5I0okS8
the conflict thesaurus: a writers guide. Angela Ackerman
Class Issues — Art Production In and Out of Precarity (nGbK), e - flux Announcements, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/437789/class-issues-art-production-in-and-out-of-precarity/
Round Up, Narcisse Blood, 2010, film 18 min
Carmen Valer,
Handlingsplan miljöarbete SKH, 2021-2022, dnr SKH 2021/156/1.2.2
Bendell, J. (2021). Deep adaptation: A map for navigating climate tragedy. In Bendell and Read (eds.), Deep adaptation: Navigating the realities of climate chaos. Polity Press, p.64. + p.58-59.
Marshall, J.P. (2012). The intranet of the living dead: software and universities. In Whelan, Walker and Moore (eds.), Zombies in the academy: Living death in higher education.
THE TIDAL ZONE, Kajsa Dahlberg, exhibition at Index, 25 November 2022–12 February 2023
Molnstudier, Forensic Architectures, exhibition, 7.10 2022 - 12.2 2023 Tensta konsthall
David Bowie, life-work
Sun-Ra, life-work
Ronald Mallett, Life-work
Joseph Yoakum, Life-work

GLOSSARY

terms/words I use to think about my research. Gradually working on my own definitions of these words

performative living
nature quest/vision quest
storied landscape. a term I first came across when I was making a film about vulcan, Alberta. It was in writings by filmmaker Narcisse Blood, where he described how places become inscribed with knowledge through songs, ceremonies and stories. and how such knowledge survive even though peoples memories of them might have faded over time and in colonial opression. (Love Thy Neighbour: Repatriating Precarious Blackfoot Sites, Authors: Cynthia M. Chambers & Narcisse J. Blood). As I have been living my storyworld in my place on Yxlö, acting out this storyworld in my relationship with the place, I recalled this term and recogized something from it in what I was doing.
Lived art. My first artistic influence as a small child was with the music of David Bowie. The way I grew up I had no encounters with visual art until much later. But the when my mother played Young Americans I sensed a whole different univers opening up in front of me, offering a filter through which my everyday life became magical. I later lived with and through each and every Bowie album, marking different phases in my adolecense. Later I learned more about how bowie lived his albums through different personas and how, as I see it, he opened up new directions for his life, new ways of living, through his music and acting out his personas. It felt very similar to what I had been doing for as long as I can remember, but on a personal and private level. Sometimes involving friends and neighbor kids in fantasy storyworld, built up around sertain places in our surroundings. The abandoned barn, the creek, the canola field, the old dam etc. Art that I have been drawn to has often shown to have been created in these dialogues with the artists surroundings and daylife. Their art caught initial my interesst, but it is their way of living their art that gives me a source of understanding for why I came to make and continue to make art.
poetics of hard science
narrative life-work
Dying with narrative
Lived narrative
Lived forms - creation of forms that comes from ways of living (Habits, ).
Livable life
Living systems

central coherance
Cognitive bias
#LiberateMyDegree
school strike
interpretative denial
implicative denial
toxic empathy
intergenerational care
research act
colonial impulse – force that dislocate/disconnect
indigenous impulse - force that connects
Oppressive forms of life
Caring forms of life
Primary world
Secondary world
Midwifing world
Hospicing world
World destitution
New world
Old world

Larger body - when acknowledging the transcorporeal connections to my environment I come to perceive the earth as my larger body.
Submissive art practice - Practicing art making while submitting to certain limitations and predefined structures.
Dominant artwork - Making artworks out of the frameworks I submit to in my practice. A way to share the experience of submitting to these frameworks. (For example Elsa and the legal documents)
Global listening - taking in everything. (Olivieros)
Autopoetic artwork - before I finish an artwork I want there to be a habitat for it to survive in. A strive for autopoiesis, a strive to adapt the artwork to the environment, in a way so that it can sustain, continue to live (without lifeupholding artificial support). This approach also require focus on the environment, working with the environment of the artwork and the artwork itself, shaping them for eachother (interchanging evolution). So before I make films I have to make sure there is a world for them where they can continue to live, generate them and their environment in a mutual strengthening. (can cinemas, galleries continue to exist if we don’t change our course? Not for a very long time I think. An perhaps it won’t be sustainable with artworks demanding electricity and tech infrastructure anyway? What other ways can we share stories? Embodied stories, shared with others through gatherings? Through ways of being with what already is, rather than creating new things? My unfinished films are all in my head, I try to get to making them, but there is a big resistance in me, that I think is also valid. I am conflicted about it. If the university takes on making cuts in emissions, it might make it worthwhile to me to make something durable. I dont want to force things to come alive that dont want to live and that without making sure there is an environment where they can live a livable life. www.elsa.film is a way of trying to be with what already is, rather than making new. Elsa lives in an environment of films already being made. She can support them and at the same time easing their footprint on the environment we all need to sustain.
Weaponized imagination -
Witnessing (Active being with. authentically being present with the dying, giving love, )
Pathway
Proper name
Suspense - a state of being attentative to the arrival of the world. Also animation term.
Anticipation – a state of being attentative to the arrival of the world. Also animation term.
Deep adaptation
Neurodiversity as research asset. Subjectivity as researcher potentials.
Withdrawl – (scarcity asceticism refrains)
Background shift - foregrounding landscapes, backgrounding humans
Measuring - new ways of measuring, Gaia cybernetics,
Safe scarcity - self restraint with basic needs covered.
Volontary scarcity - self restraint in attempt to honor the limits of the living world.
Environment play

Inbetweening - A term from the animation practice describing the creation of the missing frames between two key images, key poses or extremes, in an action. I use this image as a model for acting/worlding to act out my story world in everyday situations. Especially smears that are a kind of extreme in-between used when a transition between two very different positions needs to happen quick and there is not frames enough to display every position in-between them.

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