"Let them burn down the library in Alexandria. There are powers above and beyond papyri. We may be temporarily deprived of the ability to rediscover these powers, but we will never eliminate their energy.”
Antonin Artaud
(in: Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, David Zerbib, Bloomsbury, 2014)
ORNAMENTING (force) an ECOLOGY of TRUST (form)
Exploring Force and Form through Performance /Performativity
23 April, 2015
Pǝ'fɔ:m(ǝ)ns PERFORMANCE/PERFORMATIVITY CROSS FACULTY GROUP
Faculty of Fine, Applied And Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg
What is this power the goes beyond and above structures, rules, and material? An energy and a force, moving ongoingly, turning through any space, ruled by indeterminacy and the emergency of the unexpected. An energy risking its own values, or even the values of others. With these words in mind we proceed asking ourselves: HOW are we as human beings handling our individual forces and energies when facing new and unexpected challenges; or simply when we allow our forces to creatively and madly travel as free and boundless energies; or when our forces are under attack, and when we need to respond or to perform a critical resistance to regimes and superior powers? What can be understood about all non/in/human forces – when we allow ourselves to closely observing our own performative acts of knowing, mattering, sensing, questioning, understanding and making decisions?
The Faculty Group for Performance /Performativity invites you (this is an open invitation!) to an entangled encounter. It is an invitation to enter an academic environment on equal terms, allowing for a broad and at the same time a deep investigation into processes of understanding and knowing. The purpose of this event is to magnifying the motion of force, by placing patterns and fragments of performative ‘doings’ under a microscope and intra-actively analyzing the results in relation to form, space, time, senses, voices, products of knowledge, learning/teaching, and every day practices. We believe there is a need for tracing patterns of forces between scholarly, artistic and scientific doings (forces/practices and forms/theories that at first might appear distant from one another) through a blurred, diffused and diffractioned encounter - in order to re-generate new knowledge. When defining our own ‘doings’ in society we can eventually continue to design solutions creating changes in our habits. In a long-term perspective these changes can transform into new ways of meeting nature, but also in meeting one another as members of a complex global community. The aim of this entangled encounter is to turn forces and forms of academic traditions slightly upside-down/inside-out, somehow mirroring ‘the uneasiness’ sensed around us in our global society. Our common task will be to create an environment where boundaries between subjects and objects at first remain undefined and uncertain in order to intra-actively articulating new knowledge while ORNAMENTING (force) an ECOLOGY of TRUST (form).
For more information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/871813436209632/
Elisabeth Belgrano & Fredric Gunve
Curators / editors / performers
video documentation
