What is my role in collaborating and when does it need to be explicit, and when not?
What needs to be explicit?
Do I chose the (my) easy way or the (my) hard way?
What is missing and how do I fight or surrender to it?
How much am I the agent of my own decisions, and what is 'me'?
By accumulating and integrating of different realities, groups, cultures, mediums, can I find distillation of what is the common denominator, and is that 'me' and the way I exercise my agency?
What lights my fire and feeds the work to find its stand and urge?
It's only a rant, from a personal urge.
I want to provoke, not merely for the unease the provocation may cause, but to challenge all givens, to think through, as Hannah Arendt would say and practice being critical, disapprove, escape produced meanings that can be designed to benefit us or others, but.. do we know? And what do we believe?
I question everything, even the obvious, even for the sake of stirring the waters and I want to do it with an audience, establishing a non-conventional dialogue with them. Non conventional not because innovative in its content. I couldn't care less. But because not in the ways we may expect a dialogue to occur.
I desire to be proved wrong, hungry to be surprised by unwanted results.
Satisfied when things go 'wrong'. It is not pleasant, but it is more disappointing when they go 'right', as that would be the case of me knowing where I was heading.
Why would I head somewhere I know if what I wanted was to be surprised?
Confuse ideas, create doubts so there's a choice that can be made from scratch and reassess if that is really what it needed to be.
It sounds presumptuous and it is a rant. It is a rant!
I am bumping up against everything that is paradoxically safe, because packaged for us not to need to think about a thing. Handy for a few. Not so handy for a majority.
We're sold the idea that not to make any effort and just surrender to a system that has it all ready-made for our consume is what we need. Commodities, not only in goods but it thoughts too. Commodity = comfort (comodita' = comodita' in Italian it is event the same word). So not choosing because we can delegate creates comfort.
Disagree.
One theory? Risk, doubt, danger, in middle class western controlled society, are denied from the congnitive-vocabulary. They only emerge for control purposes, to terrorise masses preventing them from acting out of spontaneity. Once we're in, we're either taken care of if we can afford to be legal, or declined if we happen not to. Oblivious ghost, disappeared, unseen, unwanted, uncared, forgotten, declined even by the authorities unless we are a threat.
One of many questions I have is how do we keep growing, evolving, if nothing demands us to use our resources and skills (behalf our countable contributions)?
It does make me angry, it all being waaaay too ready-made.
We're told we are not in control because we don't know what tomorrow will look like.
That is a luxury problem! Disagree, again.
We are now more in control of our lives than have been in a long time. We even have a choice, to be servants of a society that pretends to pay us for the jobs we pick but actually enslaves to make the dreams of a few sustainable. And then, do we know what to do with this opportunity?
I am not capable of commanding nor of being commanded. So I live in a schizophrenic existential dichotomy.
Why does my heart beat?
The question is, if there would be no governing body, how would we organise ourselves?
Here comes my experiment (with performance):
I look at elements of tradition (movement, speech, image). I seek to destabilise them and potentially stand them up just the same, or just about tilted, but I want to face them and reassess: are they still valid or just a habit?
What do I need to do to reassess them? Glitch them to raise the question: was it always there or did I just notice? Tilt them? And if I did not notice, have I been sleeping all this time?
Nietzsche would say that history only makes sense if it's related with life. We die if we don't look at memory, but we need to constantly create the present.. and art brings man to become creator.
He would say we have lost spirituality because the space that was reserved for god has remained empty. So we have lost faith, and with it faith in ourselves to even believe we have the right to believe!
Categoric.
"If I am not in reality, and also not in my imagination, where am I?" says Domenico in Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkowsky.
A rationalist answer would be when I know I don't know, I am the most knowledgeable of all men.
As a metaphor I could say that I am a social engineer, trying to design the prototype of a world, an environment, a landscape from which a way of existing (through art) we don't know of can emerge. An experiment of an ecosystem based on new frames of reference to be constantly put in discussion, doubted, regurgitated ot taken apart to rebuild what is needed when it is needed.
There will be chaos, there will be confusion and no certainty most of all. An there shall not be. There may even be friction and confrontation which is vital to check-in and see if things are still actual. Perpetually impermanent.
Socrates saw polarities as collaborative, not competitive. We look for balance, so polarities need to exist for there to be a dynamic, alive, centre. Consumerism denies the centre, the aliveness. Consumerist individuals lives inside schemes, in solitude, unless relations are useful for their system's sustainability.
So I need chaos to feel the will to act. I need void from which to let psyche and conscience emerge.
Heidegger wrote that the crossing of many contingencies, contradictions and heres and nows, are what make the being, which should be a certain fight. Not a struggle but an alive search, for which the only solution is freedom.
Choice is one way of realising existence. And I want to provoke first myself, the collaborators who decide every day to turn up, or not to, and to invite the audience to choose what to believe. Not to 'get it' and feel like they did well despite my attempt to deceive them, but to collect doubts to inform their thought, possibly on other occasions that may come up only 5 years down the line and click, unexpectedly, something into place.
Interpretation leaves room for multiplicity. it is far from scientific knowledge, and it is restless and anxious but it is awake.
Ciao.