PERFORMANCE PROPOSAL CERC 2025
Title: Callisthenics: stories of support, aversion and love. (Working title)
Abstract:
A performance piece about being untrained, unprepared and unwilling for care giving and receiving.
The piece deals with unmentionable aspects of informal care, through the lens of intergenerational personal experiences. Drawing from the heavy emotional and physical load of caring for parents, partners or siblings, the narrative explores themes of conflicting needs and desires, paradoxes in care relationships and the interplay between love and revulsion.
An experience of having to deal with the body of an old horse became a potent symbol for the weightiness of informal caregiving. One of the performers was faced with the task of lifting this horse’s body with limited resources, mirroring the labour of providing care with finite energy and time. Through this central chronicle, the performance unpacks a version of the “spoon theory”, illustrating the daily tension between the demand for (self)care and the limited capacity to provide it.
The performance brings together a constellation of 3 generations of artworkers who believe in, and practice, art as a place of mutual care, artistic exchange and solidarity. Performance is the medium that connects us, both as method and as dissemination of our work and research. The performance is rooted in lived experiences of informal care, collaborative explorations and research-through-doing. The performers embody various roles, including caregivers, care receivers, parents and the deceased horse, shifting between them fluidly to speak of the multifaceted nature of care relationships, and to explore through ‘showing doing’, the contrasts and paradoxes of these identities and responsibilities.
The stage is set with a central winch and pulley system (provided), embodying the physical and emotional weight lifting required in caregiving. The performers alternately carry and are carried, lifted, dragged, part by part. Silence and speaking also alternate. Texts are spoken and projected, and impacted by the movement of the bodies.
Perfrroming Working questions, amongst other things, why only waged work is valued and recognised as work, it problematizes the championing of that waged work above all other activities, and its status as a condition for citizenship and social participation. It looks at the social exclusion that this causes for different people, and tries to make divers forms of hidden work explicit, exploring the value of that work and the dynamics of the invisiblisation of those doing it. A starting point for this exploration is illness, seeking to understand and make apparent what the work of living with illness is – one’s own or that of someone one is caring for – in all its many facets, including the fraught relationship between illness and the labour market. Second area of exploration is homelessness.
Have brought artist, former sudent of mine and former homeless person Bo Stokkermans on board. Has his studio in the Hague. Together we aim to create a process with this group for the development of a 'co-consnet working agreement. Participation beyond the 'consent form'. Co creation, commoning of knowledge etc.
De werkwijzen die we in het doctoraatsonderzoek zelf beoefenen zijn ook deel van het onderwerp. In geval van de bovengenoemde groep van 15, vanaf het allereerste begin werd, door onze manier van samenwerken die expliciet transdisciplinair en co-creatief is, het verschil tussen onderzoekers/kunstenaars en participanten betekenisloos. We zijn duidelijk allemaal aan het creëren, onderzoeken, problematiseren en content aan het maken. In die zin hebben we participatie achter ons gelaten en zijn we terechtgekomen in wat we misschien een verbindende praktijk zouden kunnen noemen. Daardoor komen we op nieuw terrein. De gebruikelijke vuistregels voor participatie – de consent formulieren, de AVG regels enz. – zijn niet, of niet op dezelfde manier van toepassing. Hier bestaan nog geen templates, we moeten die nu gaan uitdenken.
Het idee dat we hier willen voorleggen is dan ook: het uitwerken binnen deze groep van een manier van samenwerken tussen mensen met verschillende perspectieven op zorg en ziekte, inclusief onderzoekers: de voorwaarden die nodig zijn schetsen en een handleiding of protocol uitdenken die kan worden doorgegeven aan andere projectgroepen.