When capitalism tends not to acknowledge the existence of a class identity – and the influence it could have on individuals – and that the bourgeoisie use contemporary art as a tool of cultural distinction – and that therefore contemporary art can be perceived as socially violent towards working class contexts – what should performance artists do?

During this workshop and with several exercises, we will try to experience the complex topic of class identity and its relation to contemporary art.

After precizing concepts of performance art, intersectionality, and identity, Brenda Bikoko look at four different “cases” where these concepts are at work: the works of Adrian Piper; “Arctic Hysteria” by Pia Arke; performances about violence on women in Latin America; Black Performance in Contemporary Art.

Based upon the situated points of view and backgrounds of the participants, and based on what one would not want to raise, and even less make public, the workshop try to write what is trans – in between: what allows the passage, the hand over, the transmission, the transformation.

How does a performative experience allow for a cathartic experience, of communion, ceremonials and rites of sharing? How can one tell about oneself, connect to others, confront with an audience? In the space of the workshop, everything is addressable: what creates anger and what cares and cures. Rules have to be invented. To whom do we address our work? And why? What are you belonging to? What are you fighting for? Let’s try in an action to create change – or at least contamination.

The uncertainty of known or unknown things, longing, acceptance and change, the constant flow of news: political, social, environmental, pandemic and other disasters. How are we humans operating, coping with such situation and surviving. How are our lives and artistic activities moulded by all the struggles of society today? How can we take inspiration from this strange, uncertain, unknown situation where our lives went through ‘multiple beginnings’, several times back and forth, transforming, and again beginning?

We keep finding a new way of life, in the hope of a new start, a new beginning thus new identity. The questions of acceptance, taboos, restrictions, transformations and how they are related to different places, spaces, and time and how to deal with it, as well as the private versus collective memory, feeling of longing versus belonging, intimacy versus conflict and familiarity versus unfamiliarity all these in relation to personal identity.

The workshop play on the propagation of one’s identity to others. In the morning, body experimentations and exercises try to create a group empathy and tend to make, out of the group, one only entity, one single body. At noon, these experimentations are gathered and shared between all, and the question is raised to how one can be one, and at the same time another. In the afternoon, the common body of the participants is taken to the public space in a collective action.

System K, K like Kinshasa. In the urban jungle of Kinshasa, amid social and political chaos, an eclectic and bubbling street art scene is emerging, shouting its anger, dreaming of recognition. An important part of this scene defines itself, and definately is, performance art. The projection of the film is followed by a conversation with the film director Renaud Barret.

… and we have been dancing since then. We have been putting ourselves out on music. We have been building up mix tapes/ soundtracks. We have been rehearsing our transgressive moves and stances.

Which song am I ? Which song reflects my soul ? my heart ? Which song should I put on to get my message heard ?

We listened, searched, collected: songs. We have being finding the connection between our inner selves (at that specific moment in time, space and in relationship to what is going through ourselves) and the rhythm, the words, the images building up.

Is has being looking like a catwalk? a good old MTV 80’s video? a manifesto? a dance? a riot ? Or silence ?

Pretending to use the frame of the catwalk / the fashion show, a space and time for a series of very short performances, where performance material appeared during the week can be reactivated, modified, erased, for our pleasure and in guise of introduction of ourselves to the others. Ideally, the catwalk as a place where the superficiality of means allows for speaking the truth. But is there anything like truth?

We wrap up the week while engage in a sort of collective intelligence exercice and digg into a series of scenarios on documentation, transmission and diffusion of a work in process, a live art production as well a pedagogical program.

Basically we raised issues and experiences out from simple questions: what, how and why to document a performance and learning process / document aka harvesting, memorizing, composting, archiving, storytelling ; what, how and why not to; which feedback come from materials and matters created by experiences and/or harvested from gestures / matters such as images, sounds, writings, drawings, whispers etc. / ; how those matters interact with people while acting and learning and how they - the matters - can act/speak/tell afterward, for those same people as well as for the ones who were not there.

A practical training to help the ESA Le 75 students to master all the equipment specific to visual and sound recording: camera, microphone, artificial lighting, video and sound editing software. In addition to the technical practice and learning, particular attention was paid to try to capture movement so that shooting and editing techniques can reflect action embodied in space.

Collective portrait in Brussels

The Modus Operandi AND (MO_AND) is a practical methodology for an ethical- aesthetic, somatic-political and experimental investigation of relations and reciprocity. MO_AND’s transversal applicability ranges from: the everyday handling of living-together to collaborative creation; artistic to care practices; the work of (re)mediation to the work of intervention; decision-making to de-scission making processes; the cartography and curation of individual somatic and affective dimensions to the intimate and collective struggles for trans-form-a(c)tion and social justness. Systematized in a set of concept-tools and proposition-games that facilitate the exercise of a consistent articulation between self-care and care for the collective, and between discourse and its realization in gesture, MO_AND engages with the Irreparable by enabling the awareness of both the contingent-impermanent conditions of possibility of each encounter and the political consequences of individual and/or collective positions.
During the workshop, the proposition has been to share and practice the inhabited philosophy of Modus Operandi AND through the transmission of the basic set of concept-tools that constitute AND’s Vocabulary and the (counter)apparatus of a board game with immanent rules - the WHAT-HOW-WHEN-WHERE question-game.

The students propose an extension of Repairing the irreparable workshop by performing in a busy public square in the city, with objects collected from the street and in complete silence. By investing the context with an interrelated set of gestures, each of the performers' actions leads to another, sedimenting their relationships and ideas within the collective agency.

In the form of a life-situated game, interpinning individual and collective choices, the group engaged its own limits through the encounter with the public space, ils inhabitants and spectators.

The workshop took place aside the workshop Repairing the Irreparable by Fernanda Eugenio & Ana Dinger / Modus Operandi AND in Lagos. With Luna and Louise, we were in charge to document this workshop with a focus on sound. We decided to start our work by just listening. After this first session, we were able to figure out the way we should lead our first recordings.

Besides a lot of discussions, a good part of the workshop activities consisted in manipulation of various kinds of objects which would offer a great variety of sound textures. We decided to edit some tracks with all this material.

Collective portrait in Lagos

This workshop focused on the act of walking in the landscape as a creative and performative act. Ideas of psychogeography in relation to the rural context were explored and eco-feminism as a praxis was identified as a useful model for an ecological sustainable relationship with the natural environment. The Burren is a unique area of rugged wild beauty on the Atlantic coast and is a Unesco world heritage site of ancient limestone uplands and pavements of fossils with rare wild flowers. A deep connection with unspoiled nature can be happen in this special place thus enabling an ecologically conscious relationship to develop with with the environment.
The week began with introductory presentations on the history of performance art in Ireland with a focus on place and materials in relation to the human body. The students were were then asked to devise and prepare a short performance work about their relationship to this place using locally sourced natural environmental materials. A final evening gathering was organised on the last day where all the participants and workshop leaders came together to discuss and reflect on the week's performance learning and experiences.

I lead students of the Performing Identity Erasmus+ programme in a day-long “Bodyjam”. If performance is the medium of the body in time, space, and witness, then this too encompasses the mind itself as a constituent element of our living creative material. Over one day, appropriating the figure of the Pied Piper, I lead the participants in guided, kinetic meditation through the sun-soaked Burren College campus.

Through spoken narration, describing the events of the workshop as they happened and reflecting the storytelling properties of the human condition, I drew the students’ attention to their attention itself as a site for creative production. Through movement and cognition, we speculatively engaged the collective live moment as an artwork, a gestalt composed of each individual experience. In this way, each artist was revealed to themselves as their very practice. We are the material. We are the work.

David Donoghue brought the group on a special local work along the coast where wild oysters grow along with many rare botanical species. David introduced everyone to locally sourced foraged edible plants and seafood. This workshop strengthened the connection of the group to the local area, its resources and ecology and helped deepen place-based relationships. Everyone spontaneously jumped into the warm Atlantic waters ands experienced wild swimming at the end of the walk.

During our day long workshop, we sought to find ways of cultivating our sensitivities and sensibilities within the environment of the Burren, so that our bodies might discover the blurring of boundaries between what is ‘us’ and ‘I’, individual human person/s and what is ‘environment’. Where to our edges become less distinct, and how might our sense of self and individual morphology shift at the level of experience.

We began by finding ways to be of and in our own physicalities. What is it to be a body? How to engender awareness of our being material, of stuff, vibrant and vital stuff?

Extending that awareness outwards, towards one another in an exercise of flocking. When thinking about ecologies, we have to allow for differences. Eco-systems are dynamic by definition, and that dynamism contains reassurance and challenge to our perceptions, assumptions, experiences, and reflections. Object work of extending one’s body and senses resulted in a wide variety of experimentation, presenting to one another engaged alterities.

Students have had to demonstrate abilities to explore their individual traces and memories, perhaps use it for triggering new ideas for future experiences. They had to imagine the trace they made in the previous cities (Brussels and Lagos) such as the one made by a slug who leaves a silvery trail on the floor. They draw with only one line the journey made In Brussels or in Lagos, or, if they wanted, a projective trajectory in the Burren.

Based fully on observation and presence and in complete silence, the group was led to explore a forest and pickup vegetal plants. A camera is passed by in the group to take pictures. The students are guided to a historical and mystical place to engage in a silent ritual, to squash the plants and to collect altogether a certain amount of chlorophyll in a bowl.

Back in the studio, the group did proceed with chlorophyll with the most ancient process of photography, the anthotype technique, revealing gradually the pictures taken earlier on in the forest. This documentation is the result of a collective performance documenting a process of making documentation. It plays through ecology and performance art with that idea of mise en abime of documentation.

The students digested and explored practices, matters and gestures previously involved in the Body, Place and Materiality week of workshops in Burren College of Art, during a final and collectively orchestrated performance.

By investing the space, the materials and some found objects, the individual bodies and movements of the performers addressed personal as well as collective memories and feelings.

Collective portrait in Ballyvaughan

"The machine is tired and exhausted" said philosopher Bayo Akomolafe in 2020, talking about humans in times of catastrophe and crisis. What are the results of over-exploitation on the bodies of art workers (and especially those of live arts) in the capitalist world? During the past few years many thinkers have turned their ecological concerns into reflection about de-growth. Changing the internal rhythm of the human body is a first and quite demanding step. How do we live this over-exploitation? Are we aware of it? What does it mean “to slow down”? Slowing down doesn’t only refer to the function of speed, but to awareness. It changes the experience of time. It means not accepting to be a machine, but to be present and to acknowledge the presence of others. Can we actually rest? Can resting be an active form of resistance to the sense of productivity and endless progress? A “hands-on” workshop about rest! This workshop, the second in a series that started in Brussels in April 23, was addressing art workers from every field. After a summary of the conversations and actions which took place in April, the Turku participants shared their own experiences. A moment was dedicated to individual research about how to practically resist by resting, and implement these strategies in our work practices. Finally some time was given to resting and listening to how it resonates within us.
Workshop organized in the framework of Time For Live Art, a project supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

The New Performance Turku Biennale artists and visiting curators came together to discuss their practices. The session was moderated by Jennie Klein.

The participants shared their thoughts on how performance is crafted as a cohesive practice, how does live art “come together”, for such diverse artistic processes? What are the stakes and the challenges faced on the way? And what are the motives that drive artists and curators forward? The panel discussed collaborative formats, radical practices, and unexpected artistic journeys.

Participating biennale artists: Every House Has a Door (Matthew Goulish & Linn Hixon), Essi Kausalainen, Mark Pozlep, Jamal Gerald, Sajan Mani and Exchange Live Art (Ana Matey & Isabel Leon). Participating curators: Christiana Galanopoulou and New Performance Turku Biennale’s curators Leena Kela & Maria Villa Largacha. The discussion was moderated by performance art researcher Jennie Klein (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Ohio University, USA).

Participants: Performing Identity Erasmus + project (Burren College of Arts, La Cambre Brussels, UAP Poznań), LAPS Theatre Academy Helsinki and Turku Arts Academy The Workshop started by short presentations of universities and art academies, participants introducing themselves shortly, was followed by discussions in small groups. Three themes from the NPT Coming Together program for the student groups to address, discuss or react to: Ecological entanglements: What does it mean to create and perform in the midst of an environmental catastrophe? What is our place or our role as art agents? How can performance practice assume response-ability for this situation? Can live art help communities come to terms with it?... Can it work with impotence, uncertainty, mourning the irreversible losses? Identities: How does performance as practice relate to people’s roots and their routes shaping who they are? How may artistic work refuse easy stereotypes or work critically with them? discuss strategies for celebrating identity or contesting it. Communities: Coexistence is not frictionless. Coming together is an exercise of curiosity about others, and trust, as much as of asserting boundaries. What is for you the positive potential of disruption of social patterns? Do you incline more towards healing, listening, creating and mending bonds? Short summaries of what was discussed in each group were shared in the end, and it was followed by a moment for mingling, getting to know each other.

Artists-as-researchers Marion Boudier and Chloé Déchery were invited by Le 75 to take part in the New Performance Turku Biennale to conduct interviews with the artists programmed within the festival, in collaboration with students Louise Valin and Luna Descamps. For this, Marion and Chloé decided to conduct interviews that would inform the documentation of the artists' creative processes, using cards, photographs and drawings to elicit questions about the performance work and the making behind them.
All sorts of questions were raised: frequently asked questions, questions we never dared asking before and questions that the artists always wanted to be asked but never were...These in-depth interviews turned into conversations with multiples entries and informed the devising of new feedback methodology and the creation of a new card games, The Post Show Game. This project, led by Marion Boudier and Chloé Déchery, was supported by Performing Identity, in partnership with Performer Les Savoirs and co-funded by Eur ArTeC.

https://performerlessavoir.wixsite.com/performerlessavoirs

Collective portrait in Turku

During a all-day long seminar, the theme of "censorship identity" has been introduced, to understand the context of art and art situation in Poland – which, of course, is grounded in the complicated history of the country, both in the past and in the latest and actual unfolding.

The workshop participants were asked to send beforehand, a detailed description of one of their performances, that may be performed during the workshop: a purely technical description of the subsequent activities performed during the performance, along with specifications of the time-code. Those performances description served as the starting point for the workshop.

Trained to express ourselves ‘adequately’ to match the daily needs of ‘emotionless conversation’, we often lose touch with the vital tool of survival that our voice is, a tool that we remember using as children to express our presence, needs and essential existence. By reawakening the potential of our own voices we tap into the power we remember it once had and, with practice, this empowers us to use it fuller in our lives.

The workshop touch upon several basic elements: physical release: using simple exercises to release tension in the body that could obstruct the vocal work; breath: awareness of the presence of breath and the way it exists autonomously in our body; resonators: human sounding vibration; creation through voice: colouring, shaping, directing the sound towards a particular aim; co-sounding: existing in relation to other voices, in an unstructured soundscape and within a particular polyphonic musical relation/structure.

✵✶✷✸✹✺✵✶✷✸✹✺✵✶✷✸✹✺✵✶✷✸✹✺ A bird doesn't sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song. ― Joan Walsh Anglund

What time is it on the clock of the world? ― Grace Lee Boggs Abstract is revolutionary and that we must nurture the abstract rather than make a liberation theology of reason. ― G. Chakravorty Spivak Stand for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, property and government. ― Emma Goldman I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the anti monumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely.

I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies. ― J. Jack Halberstam We’re not marching in your fascist lines. We’re not marching in your fascist armies, we’re walking backwards. ― Jenny Romaine

The workshop has being a basic introduction to working with the specific contexts of different types of public spaces. Students have being given simple reactionary tasks - without a script - to perform in the given spaces. They worked collaboratively and individually.

The final chapter of the Censorship and Identity working session took the form of a Performance Night at the art space Jezuit Gallery, filled with presentations by international students and artists. The meeting presented artistic approaches focused on the theme of personal and collective resistance trough and despite censorship, perfomed by the students as well as Zuzanna Bielak, Maja Korczyńska, Paulina Motyl, Jerzy Norkowski, Agnieszka Olejniczak, Ksenia Pyza and Olga Skliarska, with the coordination and curatorial support of Marta Bosowska, Paulina Kempisty and Marta Ryczkowska.

Collages with two or three things we know about censorship

Collective portrait in Poznań