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weSANK
Venice – 12.5.2017
1.Considerings
Polyphonic prologue for two human voices and one digital whispering

Considering that we already sank.
Considering that we have not much left in reserve.
Considering our cognitive and sensitive alterations due to massive datafication.
Considering we are tragically dizzy.
Considering that we are dramatically and continuously human.
Considering that we might accelerate. Or slow down. Or both. Simultaneously.
Considering that time has come to compete with Silicon Valley tales.
Considering survivalism as the last avatar of the contemporary anxiety that stems from the free and
privileged contemplation of our collective disaster.
Considering the suspicion towards the convinced affirmative linearity of manifestos, that leads to consider
that these considerings should be performed randomly, simultaneously and in a hesitating loop.
Considering emptying, minding gaps and flying lines, at the same time.
Considering that our current state of crisis can be better understood as a long illusionary degenerative
sickness.
Considering, Le Malade Imaginaire.
Considering it may all have been one long fucking farce.
(A pause)
Considering the breathed (and stolen) speech and the closure of representation.
Considering Bernard Stiegler's notion of neganthropos and the way it opens the question of another
apprehension of the entropic and negentropic processes, from human perspective and agency.
Considering both the term anthroposcene and neganthropy we suggest to speculate on the word
neganthroposcenic.
Considering the last two decades' process of acknowledgement of the now famous Anthropocene and
considering the impact of the latter on scenic thinking, collision hereby producing, after Una Chaudhuri, the
term of anthroposcene with an s.
Considering that neganthroposcenic thinking is articulated with the revision of urgent needs to consider time
ecology we suggest to associate the idea of neganthroposcenic with the notion of kronotopia.
Considering that Kronos is the divine descendant of Uranus, the sky, and Gaia, the earth. But considering
also that Kronos is the planet of the Klingons, the extraterrestrial humanoid warrior species in the science
fiction franchise Star Trek.
Considering Foucault's Heterotopias, even though doubting theatre to be still an heterotopia, according to
the foucaldian assumption, if maintained within its spatially and temporally representational logic.
Considering we like contemporary witches' idea of sympoetics and wonder what it does to theatre and
architecture.
Considering with Hamlet that “the time is out of joint.”
Considering Schrödinger’s furry pet.
Considering with the three sisters that “We're living in this sort of climate where without any warning it starts
to snow, but still everyone talks and talks…”
Considering with Titania that “this bad weather and these bad moods the seasons have started to change.
Cold frosts spread over the red roses, and the icy winter wears a crown of sweet summer flowers as some
sick joke. Spring, summer, fertile autumn and angry winter have all changed places, and now the confused
world doesn’t know which is which. And this is all because of our argument. We are responsible for this.”
Considering, with Elizabeth Grosz, that matter and life transform and become transformed.
Considering wih Clov “zero and zero and zero”.
Considering that Elvis’ ghost has surreptitiously re-entered the building.
(A pause)
Considering the needed defamiliarising and even the desynchronizing of anthropocentric time – as time that
moves punctually and with a definite telos insight – and considering a new expanded field of temporality full
of not only co-presences, but co-absences, nonsensuous flows and affecting specters.
Considering the simultaneity of the here and the elsewhere, of the now and the else-when, confronted with
an apparent stage that imposes itself on our senses, but which is also, tellingly absent, gone in temporal
slippage, simultaneously vanished and diffracted.
Considering the here and the elsewhere, and the now and the else-when, as opening multiple ontologies of
the object.
Considering a revision of theatrical temporality that would pay attention to the messed up and enmeshed
temporalities of the Anthropocene, to a promiscuous and anarchic heterochrony, a time, that is, of weather.
Considering the need of a response before the revival of the fetishisation of the present, presence and
presentness. Thus considering suspicion towards mindfulness and yoga business.
Considering outsides, hence temporal definitions in regard to spatial traditions.
Considering the abandon of the desperate ontologically oriented attempt to recover the instant, to inhabit the
present, to intensify our presence in order to repair the prehistoric and contemporary increasing feeling of
lagging behind a time which would supposedly fly.
Considering Giorgio Agamben’s secret rendez-vous between the archaic and the modern and that the path
to the present has the form of an archaeology.
Considering the double symptom: 1. of the depressing history of the recurrent ideology of fixing the human
incapacity to be in the present, and 2. of the stubborn western theatre mainstream belief to proclaim itself of
the aesthetic vehicle to organise and produce this epiphanic reparation.
Considering that the direction of time has changed. That we have to dismiss a.s.a.p. chronology and linearity
from their modern scientifically and poetically proven noxious effects.
Considering that utopia ceased to be operative long before we chose to generalise predictive algorithms.
Considering travels in multiverses and multidimensional constellations.
Considering how this revised approach of time, when future might turn itself into a transformative power for
the staging for its own access, affect the re-routing of our art practices and the re-visions of our discourses
on performance.
Considering that pre-existing communicational stages and traditional representational patterns might be outof-
date to convey an access to the future.
Considering we could come back to the presents in which we have never been.
Considering how much anticipation such as the forecast of the planetary ecological catastrophe or the
countdown to the ‘Sixth Extinction’ is putting a demand on those known stages to transmute in order to
sustain themselves as experiential platforms for an access to the future.
Considering that architecture is always differed/deferred.
Considering heterochrony; that is to say considering the destabilization of the chrono-logic of the production
and the organization of theatre works.
Considering multitemporality; that is to say considering to experiment with new theatrical arrangements in
order to develop a spectatorial sensitivity to the simultaneity of manifold temporalities on and around a
chosen ‘stage’ or ‘event’.
Considering idiorythmie; that is to say considering the potentialities of a relational reorganisation in between
the stage and the spectators out of the conventional framed time of the theatrical representation. And
considering that this reorganization is based on long-term iterative process of encounter through fractal and
protean narratives.
Considering situated knowledge, network thinking, chrono-homogeneity, alter-theatricality and queer
temporalities.
Considering architecture used to be what would always remain.
Considering winds and vulnerabilities.
(A pause)
Considering, in the chicken-and-egg situation, that architecture may have engendered man, and not the
other way around.
Considering that theatre is maintained within the idea of being a technique for letting a stage to appear as an
interface; an interface or a transactional zone that should facilitate a certain, even blurry, always elusive,
access to the complexity of the world.
Considering architecture and theatre have all reasons to collaborate when it comes to building a world that
does not collapse in the following two minutes.
Considering how theatre and architecture have intersected so far that is to say considering how architects
have designed performance spaces for directors or cities. And how directors have been inspired,
metaphorically as well as scenographically by architectural constructive praxis.
Considering that we are beyond architectured drama and dramatic architecture. That is to say, considering a
revised dialogue in between theatre and architecture, directors and architects, on a non-building, nondramatic
and non-composing agreement.
Considering that scenography has drifted from a technique of realisation of decors to a speculative praxis for
the emergence of stage-events.
Considering the architectural and theatrical turn from the pyramidal organization of spaces to the labyrinthic
access of times.
Considering the good old theatrum mundi that is to say that the world is a stage and the stage is the world
and the world is a stage... but considering also that this has to be reconsidered and radically updated, since
we know that the world has already ended, and subsequently the possibility of theatre might demand a
revision of its means to access this worlds in the reworlding.
Considering that researchers Lewis and Maslin have dated the origin of the Anthroposcene in 1610 and that
Shakespeare supposedly wrote his play The Tempest on the same year. Therefore considering
The Tempest as the first anthroposcenic drama. With a long ancient greek tragic prologue and few interludes
of Basque pastorals.
Considering also architecture was definitely diluted, here in Venice, in 1978, becoming purely performative.
Considering we have long been in a post-architectural condition.
Considering that we split! we split! we split!
Considering that theatre might have reached its ultimate post-anthropocentric phase but considering at the
same time that theatre might maintain itself as specifically human technique of access, on the brink of
collapse within radical demand on earthly ones’ equalization.
Considering, with Tafuri, that architecture has already renounced the formation of objects to become a
technique of organization of pre-formed materials, that asks for an authentication from outside architecture
as soon as in the 18th century.
Considering that theatre might sustain itself as politics and therefore ethics of perception. And considering
the interest in opening those notion as, after Kokkonen, chrono-politics and, henceforth, as chrono-ethics.
Considering the hypothesis to release theatre from its conventional temporal frame determined by human
scaled linear conception of time that is to say considering that theatre might not depend on the obligation of
the now of the here, but rather be thought and implemented as scattered, always else-when.
Considering, with Hans Hollein, that “Alles ist Architektur” and that the Architektur consists in the
determination of the environment.
Considering that in French the word “scène” means stage and scene at the same time. And considering also,
since we consider polysemantics that the word “temps” in French means, at the same time, time and
weather.
Considering the emphasis on performative aspects of theatre and architecture in favor of representational
ones.
Considering that access through a stage might not be depending on representation and reflexion, let's say
on mimetism.
Considering that theatre might not be sustained by mimesis if we understand mimesis as specularity; but
considering that it might be possible though to think mimesis otherwise after we sank, maybe as radical
alteration and process of diffraction.
Thus considering that architecture is relieved from its traditional definition of being solely the art of building,
in the manner that theatre is relieved from mimesis.
Considering that theatre might still consider Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht and Beckett. And many others.
But considering too that this legacy might be way to white and gendered to be seriously considered.
Considering that we might need to drift far away from the authority of anthropo-logo-phono-phalo-centrism.
Considering that, whenever architecture has dealt with theatre, it has less altered theatre than it has
retroactively transformed itself.
Considering Gertrud Stein and Landscape Plays.
Considering the death of the character.
Considering that architecture is in a pretty bad state.
Considering the post post-dramatic theatre... that is to say reconsidering drama but beyond human scale and
history, and thus considering that the notion of hyperdrama might be useful.
Considering the unseen, that might be spelled the un-scene.
Considering time as the main, polyphonic, multivocal, plurifocal, protagonist.
Considering to let go the ecumenical community of spectators and to grow instead the idea of a spectator’s
idiorythmic and contingent assemblage.
Considering that technomultiversal expanding territories must be linked to human augmented body through a
renewed scenic thinking that produce queer imaginaries.
Considering that theatre doesn’t describe or reproduce this world which is already past but the world to come
which is already now.
Considering a theatre of forking stages.
(A pause)
Considering what might scenically collapse, persist, expand, and emerge.
Considering theatre can teach architecture how to design not for the future, but for incompossible presents.
Considering deep stage can be the site where these incompossible presents could resist destruction.
Considering that things are not going to be better in a better world but rather considering the need of
inventing survival kits, and among them scenic imaginaries, to mutate within unavoidable toxicity.
Considering oceans' unknown scenic potentialities, as much as intergalactic xenotragedies.
Considering that deep space has possibly more to do with the void between celestial bodies than with the
physical depth experienced in our daily life.
Considering that a stage is an open horizon (of awaiting). With less perspective and way more scales than
possibly graspable with conventional stage capacity. And considering that the new stage might be produced
by the weakening, the impossibility, the failing of the grasping of the scales beyond.
Considering the multiple manners to rethink space through relations of proximity, and local transmission of
effects.
Considering that the stage has been amplified to the more than human actor's network and considering an
expansion of the theory towards a spectator's network.
Considering the shift from the stage considered as center towards the emergence of the practice of a stage
considered as middle.
Considering de-hierarchisation.
Considering that the theatre director has to become an attentive and modest reshuffler of agencies and
attentions, a facilitator of the scenic experience produced by an invitation to spectate in medias res.
Considering that, contrary to what Bernard Tschumi writes, the architect is a translator and a critic and a
revolutionary. And let’s add to that, an enabler.
Considering this reshuffling is opposed to the aesthetic control of the mono-focal organization and production
of a centripetal stage and considering that this shift demands a necessarily partial suspension of directing as
knowing.
Considering architecture cannot produce the event, but merely finds stratagems not to prevent it.
Considering that this reshuffling of agencies and attentions implies a particular care to the desalination of
theatrical control over its own temporal conventions, established, so far, to reinforce, according to the
Western conception of a unitary, linear, chronological notion of time, the human-centered and specular, and
spectacular, stage, ecologically unbalanced, and no longer accounting for a world in urgent need of
redistibution of agency.
Considering that this double, linked, change of paradigm from stage-center to stage-middle, and from
director to reshuffler, does and does not imply the death of the theater, that is to say that it might open up the
possibility of a mutation – which implies the letting go of an obsolete paradigm - of this, as Carl Lavery
writes, “humanistic art par excellence” that is theatre, towards a post-humanist art which should not be
dehumanised but rather inviting humans to the non-representational experience of their own necessary
repositioning within this ecological necessity of global rebalancing.
Considering emergence in a world populated with homogenous computational agents.
Considering the need to escape reductionism and refuse pure emergence, in regard to the fundamentally
heterogeneous nature of material agents.
Considering therefore neganthroposcenic kronotopias as potentialities of the emergence of occasions of
experience of those stages-middles, appearing and disappearing at the intersection, synchronic and
diachronic, simultaneous and deferred, of the manifold human and other-than-human times, temporalities,
rhythms, tempi.
And considering them as coming under the ethical demand to rethink from a neo-scenic perspective on the
Anthropocene the human repositioning as a move within the inevitable, renewed, de-centred
technocondition.
(A pause)
Considering that we are contemplating the idea of a deep stage, as much as we are concerned by deep
time.
Considering that, beyond Eisenman, architecture also departs from textuality and that deep structure differs
from a linguistic approach and does not seek variation within invariance, but rather stems from contingency.
Considering that the deep stage is continuously and systematically scrutinizing the very relationships
constituting time and theater, also time in theater, and according to questions concerning what it means to
make theater from an ecological perspective that includes an ecocritique of the term ecology itself.
Considering that the deep stage stems from a set of procedures to locally arrange complex concretions.
Considering man may not be the producer, the actor and the spectator of such a stage.
Considering that the deep stage might not be considering anymore nature as the outside. Hence considering
that the deep stage might have no more backdrop and no more backstage.
Considering the indefinite extension of the deep stage.
Considering that the deep stage is not theological nor teleological but an uncertain zone to embrace a
certain ethical concern about environmental cataclysm, social instability and economic aberrations.
Considering that the deep stage might be made of this process of change and emergence under the risk of
collapsing.
Considering that the deep stage is rationally irrational and therefore reconsiders psychedelic and epigenetic
mechanisms through its hospitality toward altered states of consciousness.
Considering that the deep stage might not be immediate.
Considering deep stage eludes permanence.
Considering that the deep stage might provide different affordances of time and space in the simultaneous
appearing and dissolving, that is to say considering a renewed ecology of perception at play.
Considering scenic narriteratives. That is to say iterative narratives. That is to say considering the never
happening of the deep stage but its mutiple and fractal affordances through a complex transformative
network of tracing displays.
Considering that the scale of deep stage is fluctuant, and emerges as an ephemeral entanglement.
Considering that the deep stage seeks to engage with other theatrical temporalities and to propose
something that might be explored beyond ‘eco-dramaturgy’ and ‘landscape performance’.
Considering that the deep stage follows a dramaturgy that is not anymore indexed to textuality but to scenic
thinking.
Considering architecture both as an event, hence what takes place on deep stage, and as the surface on
which the event takes place, hence deep stage itself, the supersuperficie on which appears what is coming
yet remains unknown.
Considering that the deep stage is concerned with how theatre might be able to another access establishing
a reflection on its own temporal internal modes of operating. That is to say considering dividing time from
itself and considering inviting the spectator to get lost in a vortex or whirlwind of different temporalities.
Considering that the deep stage as a scenic frictional dialogue with superstructure, with big data-flow, with
preemptive societies.
Considering that the deep stage's spectators might be spectral, relational, tangential, and potential.
Considering that theatre has to consider urgently technological mediation and condition, and therefore
considering the deep stage as a pluriversal zone of negotiation for our algorithm dependent lives.
Considering ether, and cellular automata.
Considering that the deep stage could be also named the hyperstage, or superstage or archistage.
Considering that the deep stage might always be already glitching.
Considering that the deep stage engages with supersonic billions of communication protocols and
superheavy oceans' tides.
Considering that the deep stage is digitised, holographic, organic, inorganic, and stellar.
Considering that the deep stage might not replicate but reiterate that means constantly mutate.
Considering deep stage contains the principle of its own impossibility, unless architecture is considered as
the domain of administration of the growing complexity, across scales and fields, a culture medium for
everything and anything.
Considering that the deep stage might not be constructed, organized, produced and reproducible but rather
might be emerging as environmental irregular incoherent sporadic and uncertain experience.
Considering deep stage as an expansive apparatus for contingencies.
Considering deep stage refuses a unified architectural definition.
(A pause)
Considering all this, we would like to invite you to join us to imagine, prototype and perform with us the deep
stage.
Welcome.