As the new year unfolds, we take a moment to celebrate 2024 as the first year of documentation practices guiding the work on our Blog by gathering questions which have emerged from various artistic residencies and projects into a speculative scrapbook. We will be mixing them up and allowing them to liberate our imagination beyond the micro and the macro layers of cultural work by observing that performance as a practice of embodying alternative visions transcends the studio residency and recognizing a quality of artistic research within the cultural institution at large.
On this Blog, we claim ourselves as archaeologists who traverse Lavanderia a Vapore by living all the experiences: we dig in, pick up and care for traces, organic and alive, that dance leaves. We ask what remains of dance and how. When looking through the materials we have assembled so far, it seems that what remains of dance is a bunch of questions, revealing with them a posture of dialogue and discovery, one that resists the idea of a singular truth that can be owned and asserted.
Looking closely, these questions excavated from the body promise us a future.
Asking is accompanied by a desire to acquire knowledge but desire is a mobilizing force. It is a motion that ignites the body and the imagination, that seeks possibilities by unearthing key issues and igniting movement towards something that is not yet.
If we wish to see our future, we must look at what we ask.
Our questions are our oracle.
How do we play?
“A paradigm shift occurs when a question is asked inside the current paradigm that can only be answered from outside it.”
A quote from Professor Marilee Goldberg in The Art of the Question, which highlights the paradigm-shifting capacities of porosity, sets this speculative scrapbook into motion.
Questions will be dislocated: picked from their original context and placed into new collages where their initial relevance is transversed,
opening an imagination to what is beyond the visible,
choreographing our desire into phantasmagoric hunches about
the possible cultural institution.
We also take a suggestion from Iceberg, a process by the associate artist Salvo Lombardo that fosters practices of porosity and reciprocity between the artist and an institution. The iceberg, with its measurable peaks and its hidden mass, bulk and power, lends itself to imagining an intricate relational warp, a concatenation of forms of doing between the micro and macro, the visible and hidden – that translated into layers of cultural work vary between the creative residencies, programming activities, network projects; and the larger organizational context, the relational textures and community structures that surround, support and feed them.
The image of an iceberg gently disintegrates the traditional verticality of an organization’s social dramaturgy by insisting on the presence of visible and invisible entanglements, a network of mutually traversing discourses that affect the vision and design of a possible institution.
The following is an invitation to play and speculate together to further deconstruct the verticality of a cultural institution and move towards what could be.
We allow our imagination to wonder,
we ask,
what if the questions that emerged from choreographic processes, studio practice and research, were applied in the institutional dimension of cultural work?
Which visions appear?
HOW DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT? ARE YOU READY FOR THE WEEK? DO YOU FEEL TALL? HOW IS YOUR BELLY? ARE YOUR EYES FREE? DO YOU FEEL STRONG? HOW DO YOUR SHOULDERS FEEL? WHERE IS THE AIR IN YOUR BODY?
HOW IS YOUR HEART BEATING?
IF AND HOW IS YOUR MOOD CHANGING?
WHERE DOES IT BURN?
WHAT DO YOU LIKE? WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD?
HOW LONG DOES A FEELING LAST?
WHERE ARE YOU AMONG THE OTHER BODIES?
HOW DO YOU BECOME A WE? WHAT KEEPS US TOGETHER?
HOW DO YOU DEEPEN THE GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS BETWEEN BODIES?HOW DO YOU SUBMERGE IN THEM?
ARE YOU IN LOVE? WHEN DID YOU FIRST FALL IN LOVE? HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU FALL IN LOVE AGAIN?
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO FALL IN LOVE?
HOW DO YOU CREATE SPACES FOR DREAMING? HOW DO YOU SUSPEND LOOKING AT THINGS BY THEIR NAME? HOW DO YOU OBSERVE WITH THE QUESTIONS PLANTED IN YOUR BODY?
HOW DO YOU CULTIVATE DESIRE?
WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY FOR?
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN FACED WITH THE SPECTACLE OF A SHATTERED WORLD? WHAT CAN BE REBORN FROM THE RUINS?
HOW DO YOU FEEL CAUGHT BETWEEN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE?
WHICH FORMS DO YOUR TRACES ASSUME?
HOW ARE YOU WITH YOU? ARE YOU STRUGGLING TO BREATHE?
WHAT HAS HAPPENED?
WHERE WERE YOU?
HOW DO YOU LIVE WITH YOURSELF?
WHERE WOULD YOUR BODY LIKE TO BE RIGHT NOW?
WHERE DO YOUR FEET GO?
HOW DO YOU IMAGINE YOUR BODY?
ASKING MEANINGFUL QUESTIONS IS A PRACTICE OF
SPELLCASTING
THAT DIS-ENCHANTS THE SOURCERY OF CAPITALISM DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN OUR BODIES. WHEN FINDING ALIGNMENTS BETWEEN THE CHOREOGRAPHIES THAT OPERATE DEEP WITHIN US AND DESIGN THE WORLD AROUND US
OUR BODIES BECOME GYMS TO PRACTICE MAGIC,
INVOKING SIMPLE YET ALCHEMIC DISTURBANCE OF THE ASYMMETRIES RESULTING FROM TACTICS OF REALITY MANAGEMENT THAT DELINEATE US FROM THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF PLEASURE
AND THE DISCOVERY AND EXPERIENCING OF OUR COLLECTIVE BODY.
MANIFEST NO 3, MARCH 2024
Questions harvested from:
Come stiamo?, the artistic residency of Anna Basti
DANCE WELL: come viaggia la traccia?, Gaia Giovine Proietti’s documentation of the Dance Well project
DARK MATTERS: nel cuore dell’abisso, The Dark MatterS Winter Festival 2024
Come si coltiva il desiderio?, the Take-away Archive
I campi gravitazionali, a project in the frame of Forever Young
ICEBERG: residenza artistica di Salvo Lombardo, the artistic residency of Salvo Lombardo
Il tempo delle mele, a project involving groups over 65
In the meanwhile, the collective research project Interspazio
L’ECO DELLE PAROLE: un manifesto poetico sull’adesso, an artistic residency at school in the frame of School of Wish
PALESTRA DEL FEEDBACK: formulare e riformulare la domanda, a collective residency of feedbackCollected and curated by Kadri Sirel