PSi #21 2015: FLUID STATES

transporting / transferring / transmitting

Performances of UnKnowing

A yearlong globally dispersed conference in 2015, PSi #21 Fluid States:

Performances of UnKnowing works towards the decentralization, internationalization and remapping of Performance Studies international (PSi) through regional research clusters working outside PSi’s existing geography. Rather than defining global regions through the received cartographic flatlands of continents and nations, PSi #21 Fluid States will be assembled around the more fluid and shifting oceanic grounds of the seas that separate and bind territorial margins: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern Oceans, as well as subsidiary bodies of water such as the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Baltic Seas. Rethinking performance studies in terms of shifting geopolitical and sociopolitical realities, fractures and flows, PSi #21 Fluid States will use locally situated conference structures strategies to encounter and convey performances of (un)knowing as opposed to sanctioned systems of knowledge.

Over the year, twelve to fifteen regional gatherings (some involving multiple events) will be staged in diverse locations, including the Pacific, North Atlantic, Asia, Australasia, Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America. As ‘islands’ each cluster will be connected by a performative ‘vessel’ that travels – via air, sea, radiowaves and other channels – to dock at each site of encounter and exchange ‘cargo’ before connecting to the following event. These encounters will also contribute to an accruing online interactive archive and touring exhibition. Each island cluster, as co-organizers, will develop distinctive themes generated through the specific cultural, social and political circumstances of their locality.

Rather than a global and all-inclusive theme, PSi #21 Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing forms a conceptual platform for critical discussion: a permeable frame exposed to manifold responses and challenges.

TIMEFRAME: 01.01.2015 – 31.12.2015

SITES: Various Locations Around the World

LAUNCH OF WEBSITE, CLUSTER SCHEDULES & CFPs: 01. 01. 2014

 

PROJECT MOTIVES:

internationalization, diversification, decentralization and collaboration

Since Performance Studies international was founded in 1997, its annual conferences have tended to take place in North America and Western Europe (with the exceptions of New Zealand, Singapore and Croatia). Being international, however, involves an understanding of performance research as a diversity of approaches that can be traced back to various practices in many different locations and contexts. A crucial question is how to engage with such multiplication of perspectives and sites of contestation. In order to recognize an ever-changing topography that challenges the domineering influence of a stable center, in its 21st year PSi will focus on facilitating a series of interconnected events organized in various regions and locations outside or on the margins of its existing geography.

One of the mainsprings of the PSi #21 Fluid States project is to follow a “trajectory from global concerns to local issues and problems” (Rustom Bharucha) – i.e. from intercultural and international to intracultural and intraregional problems, practices and prospects. We are therefore designing the 2015 project around a programmatic complexity that considers diverging and converging histories and actualities encompassing the lives and performances of people in places hosting events, to the point where the glocal relevance of regional clusters might challenge PSi’s future.

More than simply a series of conferences/symposia, PSi #21 Fluid States: is a manifold and collaborative project that invites encounters between emerging and established communities, organizations and scholars/artists, in order to research interweaving or contesting cultures and ecologies of their performances, received, accrued and mutable.

PSi #21 Fluid States will happen in local languages as distinct local events. Conventional formats and communication structures of conferences and symposia can be questioned and reimagined, allowing for local performance traditions to inform their conception, organization and staging. Hybrid renditions and representations of scholarly and artistic research are welcomed along with novel models of creative production and partnership between arts and cultural organizations, academic institutions, and international cultural agencies.

PROJECT THEME:

Fluid States – Performances of unKnowing

PSi #21 Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing is not envisioned as a global and all-inclusive theme but a conceptual platform for multiple critical encounters and conversations. Each event will develop distinctive themes generated through the specific environmental, social, cultural and political circumstances of their locality The events, and the encounters between events, will enact ‘performances of unknowing’, rather than performances of ideas ‘known’ within dominant social and political paradigms, or, indeed, colonialist ideas of the ‘unknown’.

How do we perform what we assume we know? How do we respond to, and become responsible towards, the particularities of the local, cultural, historical, ideological, social and political conditions of others’ performances, as well as of our own? In what ways does performance question and shift, or confirm and standardize the elements, structure and operational modes of the knowledge system (its signification protocols, discourse formations, transformative potentials, methodologies, institutions and distribution)? In what way is the unknown implied within the knowledge system, albeit isolated on its margins or excluded from its sights, institutions and market? Is it conditioned by difference, specificity, complexity, locality and liminality, or does it carry its own unknown logics, beyond the relational and potentially always colonized semantics of the other?

In exploring these issues, PSi#21 Fluid States emphasizes the fluxes, flows and currents that circulate around and in between fixed, stratified cartographies of knowledge: deep and treacherous spaces that are in-between and in-motion and thus have the potential to problematize boundaries and remap relations and limits.

 

PROJECT’S TRANSITIONAL DRAMATURGY:

transporting / transferring / transmitting

The overall format, composition and structure of the PSi#21 Fluid States project is based on a dynamic and transitional dramaturgy. In addition to its autonomous program, each discrete regional island will link to those preceding and following by receiving a vessel delivered from elsewhere (transported), which is responded to (transferred), and conveyed beyond the event (transmitted): transport is the journey, transfer is the encounter and transmit the act of communication.

The PSi 2015 project is structured as a tripartite process as follows:

1. SHIFTING CLUSTERS: ISLAND – VESSEL – DOCK: live performance, conversation, collaboration in-transit through travelling artists and academics;
2. EXCHANGE: virtual performance in-transit through an interactive website;
3. CARGO: performative exhibition incorporating cargo that has been subject of transportation_transference_transmission.

1. SHIFTING CLUSTERS
In order to provide opportunity for encounters, interconnections and correlations between the clusters/islands their curators and organizers are asked to devise a structure made of these 3 independent or overlapping or interweaving components:
a. the island – as the regional cluster itself – forms a specifically themed local component with its autonomous program of activities and performances;
b. the vessel is the conveyance module of material received from, generated by and shipped off to the next island;
c. the dock is an encounter component of the cluster/island where participants receive and respond to the vessel sent from the preceding cluster/island.

The island is both environment and event of the actual and particular local cluster, which is rendered dynamic – or shifting – through the dock and the vessel as well as its interactive and collaborative programs in-between scholarly and artistic research. The genre, format and autonomous program of each cluster/island itself will vary depending on the response and approach of the local curators and organizers. The form and medium of the vessel may vary as well. Whether it will be a live presentation or a multimedia module, a panel or publication or installation, it is the vessels that will create connections in between the clusters/islands. Possible dissonances, storms and traumas of encounter, failures to launch or dock the vessel are not negated but will be negotiated, problematized and embraced by the 2015 project dramaturgy. Political, economical, social and cultural, as well as ecological realities of respective localities will undoubtedly affect the conceptual devising and actual unfolding of the project. Its dramaturgy will not calculate with misperformances but coalesce with their potentiality. Eventually, the fluidity of our states might well petrify when tackling tragedies caused by war or natural disaster.

2. EXCHANGE: online platform
As a model of collaboratively accruing and sharing information, the Fluid States website will interconnect and communicate across the dispersed loci and vast distances of the clusters and associated research projects. We intend to establish a dynamic, interactive website that not only facilitates updates and discussions, but also creates a living archive for the events, as well as a depository and conduit for various collaborative research projects aligned with the Fluid States venture: digital site as carrier. The website will work on a number of levels: conveying information to a global audience; affording an interactive vehicle for participatory documentation; and offering a curated online journal for artistic actions and analytical reactions. Cooperating with The Other Sea in Rijeka, the website also aims to investigate how such a tool can perform globally while recognizing the local and other non-digital modes of (re)presentation.

3. CARGO: performative container
The proposed exhibition (working title, Gathering C’Argo – referring to the ship of the Argonauts that was consecrated to the sea and translated into a constellation of stars) will be developed from the exchange occurring across the year and will utilize spatio-visual, material and technological performativity to convey findings and provoke action. Incorporating and extending the website, this performative exhibition/installation intends to form a dynamic and evolving space for live encounter between past Fluid States events, ongoing projects and concomitant debate. The intention is to incorporate communities of local participants in each exhibition location while connecting them to remote sites and actions. As a pedagogical tool and mobile environment it may incorporate technological performances and embodied action to share performances of knowing and offer glimpses towards unknown horizons.

FLUID STATES ISLAND CLUSTERS currently confirmed

Montreal, Canada,
“Trans-Montréal: Fluid States/États Fluides” (collaboration with the event in Saskatchewan, Regina; “Playing Turtle Island: Aboriginal Performative Identities”)

Omarska, Bosnia,
“4 Faces of Omarska: The Flow of Ideological (Under)Currents”

Dean’s Blue Hole, Long Island, Bahamas,
“dEEP ANATOMY”

 Melbourne and other sites, Australia,
“Movement Forms of an Island Continent”

Cluj / Marseilles, Romania/France,
“Fluid States of European-ness: Performance, Living Cultural Heritage and Transnational Identities In-between Romania and France”

Manila and other locations, Philippines,
“Performance in Archipelagic Space”

Santorini, Greece,
“Aural Lighthouses – A Beacon from Radio Free Santorini”

Greenland, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway – North Atlantic,
“CON TAIN: Fluid States North”

Tohoku, Japan,
“Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality & Pilgrimage in Nthn Japan”

Polynesian Island – The Pacific,
“From depths of brine & fire: Performance in a fluid continent”

Santiago, Chile,
“MASHUPCITY – Becoming public: territories of migration in Santiago Centro”

New Delhi, India,
“Rethinking labor and the creative economy: global performative perspectives”

Jbeil, Lebanon,
“MENA’s Revolutionary Wave”

Africa [location and theme to be announced]
“Fluid States Africa”

 

OVERALL PROJECT ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE (current)

Curator & Director of Dramaturgy – Marin Blažević
(clusters program and correlation)

Curator & Director of Design – Dorita Hannah
(overview of design identity / website / exhibition)

Director of Creative Production – Bree Hadley
(development, production and fundraising)

Director of Communications – Rodrigo Tisi
(design and communication platforms)

Executive Production & Coordination – Davor Mišković & The Other Sea
(vessels and web-hub)

Project Assistant & Archivist – Arseli Dokumaci

PSi 2015 Organising Committee – Rustom Bharucha, Jisha Menon, Mick Douglas, Meredith Rogers, Amanda Yates, Hayato Kosuge, Katherine Mezur, Jazmin Llana, Amelia Jones, Sam Trubridge, Ileana Drinovan, Milica Tomić, Gunhild Borggreen, Laura Luise Schultz, Ioana Szeman, Nadra Assaf, Rose Martin, Marin Blažević, Dorita Hannah, Bree Hadley, Rodrigo Tisi, Arseli Dokumaci, Davor Mišković

PSi 2015 Advisory Board – Maaike Bleeker (PSi President), Edward Scheer (PSi Past President), Tracy C. Davis, Branislav Jakovljević, Peter Eckersall

Online Platform Content Curator – Una Bauer

Exhibition Designers – Kasia Pol, Stuart Foster and Nick Kapica

Development Manager – Lisa Newman

Development Assistance Marijana Cvetkovic and Biljana Tanurovska

PSi 2015 Preparatory Committee (2010 – 2012) were: Tracy C. Davis, Gunhild Borggreen, Jisha Menon, Laura Cull, Bree Hadley, Branislav Jakovljević, Nicholas Salazar Sutil, Peter Eckersall, Sophie Nield, Dorita Hannah and Marin Blažević.