These letters have been written during COLLECTIVE SIGNATURES, a cultural project conceived by independent curator and PhD candidate Francesca Carol Rolla as a critical hub of conversation, collective enquiry and performative writing, to enquire into the role and responsibility of the curatorial practice within performance art, focusing on the value of writing in both these practices. For its first edition “Letters from Formentera,” the legendary troupe La Pocha Nostra and artist duo VestAndPage were invited by Rolla to join her in the Balearic Island of Formentera (ES), in April 2018. During a ten-day artist-and-curator-in-residence, Rolla proposed to La Pocha Nostra and VestAndPage to write a letter to an imaginary independent curator, contesting the normative trends of the curatorial practice from the perspective of performance art.
Multiple, disparate, heterogeneous authorships that combine, overlap, and intersect, without it being possible to reduce them to an individual, sovereign authorship.
Boris Groys
Formentera, 25 March 2018
I felt I was dreaming with you when you told me your story.
Words would draw our space, cardinal markers of your imaginary world.
As a smoke sculpture that sound came to haunt memory and to speak our secrets.
I wished it would not disappear.
I witnessed a voice that rules of rational knowledge would mute.
I had the feeling that something was left behind at the threshold of the sentences.
Right there I could feel you. I could enter with my imagination.
It thus became our story.
I therefore thought it might exist a yet unexplored way of writing.
To leave traces of a word pronounced for a different image of the real.
And I had a vision. We were together.
We were at the far end of a long street, in a remote corner of an island.
In front of us, a lighthouse, sharply cutting the darkness.
A meaningful horizon, a poetic edgy path.
An ungraspable bright future would connect us.
I am asking you to write, performance artists, because to me writing is an act of freedom – Drilling rocks and crossing oceans, words exist to remember and resist.
To create, reclaim and renew.
And I saw you performing, finding the pulse in nature, trusting your voice within.
Learning as you do.
Our story has to be told. Otherwise it dies.
And now I need us.
I need us to discover how fertile the textual border between performance art and the curatorial can be.
I need us to investigate possibilities and limits of co-creation processes, for everybody to be excited when working together.
I need us to explore different approaches, to challenge the crucial role of textual production for both our practices.
To enact a writing independent temporary community as a collaborative act –
This I consider as the closing step of my PhD research about the curatorial, to textually respond to our time.
A journey that, starting from a theoretical investigation, now, through this project, opens the curatorial up to a new and broader performative dimension.
My vision was about this – us, walking forward.
Exploring the absolute unknown of a space where our practices finally converge.
Please join me in Formentera.
Yours,
Francesca Carol Rolla
Formentera, 22 April 2018
Dear Francesca,
Thank you for inviting me to be with you, to work with you, to write to you.
To write.
I am writing this to you,
as a woman and an artist scarce of words for they are definite – like insects of time, skewed on a wall,
as a woman and an artist whose name when called out is silence
and a blank space when written.
Give me a new name.
As a woman and an artist who needs to be alone, but cannot exist without you.
You are the other side of me and I am the other side of you.
As one who is learning, yearning for knowledge – just like you.
Who needs others – just like you, to insist on her to take risks, to venture on unpaved roads together for freedom cannot be found in one place alone.
Who questions art and purpose – just like you, for divisions and separations can’t be the base for unity.
Who thinks that mankind is not the most important thing – just like you.
Who believes that our bodies do not end where our skin is, that movement does not stop where the body is, and that being does not stop where the mind is – just like you.
Firstly,
please forgive me.
Forgive me for the moments in which I thought of you with bad feelings, presuming from you intentions, projecting onto you motives of a system from which you so determinedly endeavour to escape.
Forgive me for not seeing your true effort, nature, your true intents, aspirations and visions.
Forgive me for not trusting you, for not understanding that there is no separation between us, you and me.
Please challenge me.
Challenge me to step out into the unknown, for we know what we know and we don’t know what we don’t know.
Challenge me to use mediums and methods that are unfamiliar to me.
Challenge me to go on a journey together without knowing where to, trusting that we know the path as we’re going it.
Challenge me to be with you. To listen to you, to be in dialogue.
Challenge me to know the other one, for without knowing the other I cannot know myself.
Please teach me.
Teach me to humble myself and my art inside you.
Teach me to entrust myself and my art to your knowledge and vision.
Teach me to dedicate myself to you, to be generous with you and your vision, just as you dedicate yourself to and are generous with me.
Teach me that we are in this together, that nothing exists on its own, that only together we can step beyond.
Teach me to not take anything for granted.
Teach me that the greatest effort is not concerned with results,
that the greatest precept is continual awareness,
that the greatest patience is humility.
Dear young independent curator, I wish for you
that you trust in not conforming with the world’s way and see through appearances,
that you continue to expand beyond yourself.
That you entrust yourself in your courage, kindness, capacity, creativity and freedom.
For then we will meet again on that field,
there where this beauty
which we all admire, yearn for and aspire
blossoms.
Verena Stenke (VestAndPage)
ph.LorenzaCini
Dear young independent curator,
I write to you from the balcony of my personal experience; 35 years of making live art across borders & collaborating with artists and curators from 4 continents. I’m proud of my artistic practice… and exhausted. For 35 years I helped young rebel artists to fly and today I can barely open my own wings, and they are full of insects.
I write to you with total humility, as a strategic insider/outsider of the art world, appealing to your artistic vision and ethos… and I will be bold.
Are you aware of your power? Do you realize that the life of the artist is in your hands? My dear, this “undeserved power given your age and lack of international experience,” (says my generation) cannot be taken lightly. But you can prove yourself that you are worthy of the power that has been given to you by the Big Institution.
I know, it’s normal, of course you want to rise up the ranks in the biggest sexiest art space… It is ok to dance with the devil, but you should try to not get burned. Outsmart the devil, the sexy institution, during the dance.
Remember: You are our broker, coyote, and Trojan horse.
Don’t just follow the latest trend. Follow your critical ideas, even whenthey go against fashion, money and recognition.
Fight ageism. Be an ambassador between generations. Guide your generation with the knowledge you acquire working with more experienced artists. We need you as much as you need us. We are your memory; you keep us current and visible.
Listen to the artists; and then challenge them to become a better version of themselves. In return, part of our job is to listen to you and challenge you. But please don’t get angry when we talk back & question your decisions. Older curators get very angry whenever we do it.
Distrust art magazines. Distrust the art market. Don’t let them manipulate you. They serve the interests of the commercial art world. You don’t.
Distrust academia. Find your own voice. Be independently minded,
always against the status quo, the lingua franca, la lingua normativa.
Learn other languages. Be open to linguistic otherness and fluid within it. In the imaginary borderless world we wish to inhabit, it is necessary to be multilingual. Unfortunately, for reasons we all know, English has been the dominant language in the art world, and we need to change this.
Take a step out of the art world. Engage in an ongoing dialogue with all kinds of people: activists, socially conscious scientists, and weird people in your neighborhood, even bar flies at your local bar. Have a few criminal friends. Ask the homeless what they think about art.
Be prepared to wear multiple hats: cultural DJ, intellectual warrior, researcher, archivist, nurse, cook, friend, hostess, even chauffer. They are all equally important. From sweeping the floor and cleaning the mess of the artist, to persuading wealthy people and politicians to fund us. Cross that class border regularly. Do it with humor. Don’t worry, we will clean your mess, blood and vomit as well.
Be also our translator, interpreter and abogado defensor, not our ventriloquist or circus impresario.
Step outside your zone of comfort. Perform with us. Take off your existential clothes. Become part of a live image. And in turn, invite us to curate the project.
Be tender to us, we need it to feel empowered, because we are broken humans. We will reciprocate with radical tenderness and powerful art actions.
Please don’t treat us as the new specimen you have discovered; or if we are aging, as the forgotten artist you’ve rediscovered. Treat us with utmost respect, as peers. We will treat you accordingly. Let’s develop a new trust.
Like Francesca says, “Create a project, curate a project, make the artists feel at home, keep the energy at a high level.” The amount and quality of energy you create in the space – that’s the project! And from that sui generis hub, we will venture into the unknown, terra ignota, the place we are all looking for.
Choose the right space to locate the project, a weird space. Create a generous team. Build an eclectic community of difference. Work horizontally.
Create your own map. Live outside of the centers even if only part time. Travel south and learn how other cultures do it. You will be surprised and humbled.
Create utopian projects, impossible projects that defy the status quo. Takeus to faraway lands with you. And then in reciprocity, we will host artists from faraway lands in our hometown.
Write daily. Writing is a militant act. Write your own script for life. Write indialogue with the artists you are working with.
Engage in a highly personalized dialogue with the artists you invite.
Through this dialogue, you will discover the true potential and possibility of the project. The project will end up being very different from what you originally conceived.
Being live art an evanescent ritual, create high quality documentation of every project you undertake. We need it. Our shadows must be sharp-edged. The publications, catalogues, video and sound archives you create must reflect the depth, complexity & scope of the project. We often feel betrayed by unusable, sloppy documentation.
When you commit to artists, please, I beg you: do not abandon them.
It is like a love commitment.
Is it now or never? It is every day and for the rest of our life.
It is a lifetime commitment, for both artists and curators.
Finally, help me to be a better artist than I am. I expect you to look after me. As a curador, I expect you to cure my wounds and help me heal my broken bones. Because I often fall during the process.
I might also get lost in the journey and you have to help me find the way back to my inner island, archipelago or barrio.
Will you feel tired after doing all of this? Most likely.
But trust me, this work is making us all exhausted…
It’s the nature of the work. It’s an impossible task and we are in the business of the impossible.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Formentera, border zone
Equidistant from Algiers & Barcelona
Under the patronage of the Conseill Insular de Formentera, the Conseilleria de Cultura, Participatio I Esports, Institutd’Estudis Balearics, and the program TalentIB, COLLECTIVE SIGNATURES first edition – “Letters from Formentera” has been presented by Studio Contemporaneo non-profit Cultural Association, in collaboration with the Venice International Performance Art Week and the Doctoral School of Humanity, Strasbourg University.