Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
―T.S. Eliot
Some time ago, when I decided to commit to the arts and embark on a radical change of direction towards the curatorial practice not merely being an active form of cultural production, but a powerful mode of knowledge, cognition and becoming, I felt it was crucial to focus on performance art – a process-based art practice – for its potential to capture, question and embody human and social urgencies of the contemporary, bringing into view alternative realities.
In 2015, artist duo VestAndPage officially invited me to be part of the Venice International Performance Art Week and its Educational Learning Program as associate curator.
Discussions about how subjective agencies – as entities in constant transformation – can actively respond to global states of emergency through creative practices brought us to envision a new project. Our idea was to create an experiential situation where artists could exchange and experiment, learn, develop, produce on site and present new individual and collective live works. A community space of action and discussion, where to artistically confront and expound upon specific and crucial issues.
During co-creation processes, how do identities challenge themselves when they are put in relation (or find themselves subjected) to other identities? How do they transform? Is it possible to shape the reality in which we live through those transformations? Where does the change begin? How can we contribute for the better through performance art and research in contexts of creative sharing?
In December 2017, under the title Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1, the Venice International Performance Art Week thus headed into a new direction.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
―T.S. Eliot
Along a ten-day artist-in-residence structured through intensive theoretical and practical workshop, collective discussions, and lectures – whose three final days dedicated to the creation of a public performance opera conceived as a culmination of the shared learning path – 75 performance artists, coming from 27 different countries and selected through an open call, joined at the European Cultural Center, Palazzo Mora in Venice (Italy), to challenge and expand their individual praxis, within an independent temporary autonomous zone of co-creation.
The way in which the methodological proposal was designed by tutor artists Marilyn Arsem, VestAndPage and Andrigo/Aliprandi shaped the need to test and research horizontality in the teaching approach. The lecture program led by performance artists Robin Deacon, Marcel Sparmann and Preach R Sun, Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson founders and directors of Grace Exhibition Space (New York), and artistic director and producer Elisabetta di Mambro inspired the students to critically think about their practice, stimulated by different theoretical approaches and subjective experiences.
Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1 focused on the activation of a testing-ground of different performance art experiences converging together – a temporary artistic space of human actions and interactions, open to the unpredictability of the process itself. It allowed for the unexpected. Within each participant, each encounter, each proposal lied a realm of possibilities. This became the spine of the individual and collective performative research led on site.
VIPAW, Venice 2017. Photo: Lorenza Cini
The whole purpose of my saying – and I am screaming to you, I want to get free –
All I am saying is, this is my experience. What’s your experience? Let’s share, let’s talk to each other. When we confront each other, then we break through the difference, in order to understand that we have a common goal together. That’s freedom.
So, for me, this work is larger than art.
―Preach R Sun
From my perspective as a curator, it was interesting to witness how the project questioned power positions and relations and epistemological authority.
Merging into a shared space of creativity, artists’ personal experience underwent a transformative process, which empowered their individual practices. The search for the performative gesture called all participants to dip into the source of creative potential, and to surrender to new states of becoming whose qualities were yet unknown. Artists were asked by the tutors to get to the core, stepping out of their comfort zone. To take care of their own presence and be aware of their own movements – flowing and shifting with authenticity, care and mutual respect. Listening, empathy and attention were required to explore and create within such a complex vibrating constellation.
Even if ten days were not enough to entirely bring all singular identities to operate and expand as a collective being, this new faceted organism quickly happened to build up its own episteme, deconstructing common beliefs and expectations because new emerging insecurities found the ideal terrain to be transformed into artistic material detached by whatsoever generic psychological implications.
Final public performance. Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1, Venice 2017. Photo: Lorenza Cini
Artists were deeply challenged in their practice and in their own identity, trying to tame their ego, trying to find their own place in something that happened to be larger than art – the search of freedom, as Preach R Sun stated during his performative lecture.
They understood that this journey would have never taken place if we were not together. Eventually, they realized how powerful and transformative the encounter of different identities can be.
This is how Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1 shifted the notion of authorship, questioning the paradigm of artists and curators as self-determining agents. Although the process began from each single participant, it evolved into a collective effort. We were all artists and curators at the same time, co-creators, dealing with a renewed sense of responsibility towards the community.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
―Anaïs Nin
Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1 also offered a way to critically respond to the proliferation and accumulation of cultural objects. Its process and construct enabled to question the notion of signature – as a sign of the self-sufficiency of the autonomous work with respect to the commodification of artworks within the market.
Whatever aesthetic direction the project actually took when presented to the audience, it was about a collective piece shaped as a chorus. As critical and delicate each identity process has been, and as difficult it was to orchestrate and guide the whole process, we all had to learn about power dispersion. Power was in the process itself, and in the distribution of responsibilities.
Final Performance Opera at Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1, Venice 2017. Photo: Mauro Sambo
If the signature normally exists as a validation of artworks’ social existence – their identification and recognition in a capitalistic society – during Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1 there was no single author. The idea of signature – and moreover of individual signature – thus collapsed.
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, You will live along some distant day into your answers.
―Rainer Maria Rilke
I emerged from the project asking myself what brings us to cede power and how intellectual freedom can be thought or learned. The educational turn and the opening of the curatorial to a dynamic experience of co-creation disclosed the way in which curating can exist as a process that unfolds in the time where it is needed – as an open possibility for new modes of becoming, for better conditions of life.
Some time ago, Marilyn Arsem asked me what pushes me to feel that committing a big portion of my life to the curatorial practice and research is worth it.
I found my place as an independent curator in the field of performance art because of the practice-based constitutional quality of both practices. Because of how exciting, vital and profound when the curatorial enquiry is extended to multiple intelligences can be. Because research can expand and apply beyond its discipline, once we question ourselves about how culture and knowledge are acquired, discovered and performed.
Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1 highlighted the need for the curatorial to look at alternative approaches towards collaboration and co-creation, in a way that cannot always be pre-determined or formulated a priori, rather is generated through moments of togetherness, consequential actions and deeper reflection on such actions.
Here is where the social value of the curatorial enquiry resides.
And this is my ethos and cultural imperative.