Staging Disensus
Performative lecture
Reloading images intervention for SURVIVAL KIT 4 focused on the intersections between artistic agency and dissensus. By employing historical and fictional elements, documents and research materials produced during the project ‘On Dissent – A collective narrative”, we will use different methods and approaches to explore downshifiting as a dissensual practice.
“Staging dissensus” is a lecture performance that will depart from a series of conversations held in post-revolutionary Cairo with a range of different people such as an historian, an anthropologist, a lawyer. With the aim of casting an indirect glance on the relationship between images and history, representation and dissent, our work will explore the notion of archive as a dispositif that frames the ways in which we create and convey our stories and sense of belonging.
"Staging dissensus" will function as a fragmentary archive in progress, whereby the concept of memory as historical witness will be put into play and challenge through ideas of fabrication and deception. The aim is to plunge the viewer into a narrative that oscillates between the real and the virtual, documents and desires, the possible and the unknown, where the limits of a fictional representation meets the tones of a dramatic realism.
This work has been developed in collaboration with Tuna Yilmaz (IKSTD, Izmir in the framework of EU-Turkey Tandem, a cultural programme supported and organized by the European Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Mercator, in collaboration with MitOst, Anadolu Kultur and Bilgi University. With the support of the project DE.MO./MOVIN’UP 2012
A CURA DI / BY Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali Direzione Generale per il Paesaggio, le belle arti, l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee con la partecipazione di Direzione Generale per lo Spettacolo dal Vivo E/AND GAI – Associazione per il Circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani
This presentation in Riga has been supported with a mobility grant from the Italian programme ‘Movin’ up 2012’.
Downshifting? After, or along with, downshifting perhaps one should identify a moment of invention that, as Derrida would say, it doesn’t mean to create ex-nihilo but to find for the first time: ‘to find is to invent, when the experience of finding takes place for the first time’. It is first of all a question of how to invent and not of what: if inventing is finding something that is already there, something that has always being there but now it is given, or invented, into a new configuration.
Artists' Bio:
Reloading Images signifies an approach rather than a fixed agenda of theoretical questions or issues. The focal questions of each Reloading Images project differ and are based on the specific circumstances in which they are placed. Our previous projects have explored the complex web of unconscious influences, cultural phenomena, migratory forms, and subjective constructions of narratives that contemporary society is based on.
Since its inception, Reloading Images has been committed to foster mutual capacity between international artists to develop a reciprocal network of collaborative practices and artists’ initiatives focused on exchange, collaboration and interdisciplinary research. Our strategy is delineated firstly through research and workshops; we seek to find ways of combining academic and artistic, experimental and applied, intuitive and research-based forms of discourse and display. We create temporary structures in which experiments can be undertaken, formats explored, forms of language and (visual) communication re-appropriated.
In the past we have organized exhibitions, conceived performative interventions, published books and implemented workshops. Among our recent collaboration partners have been the House of World Cultures Berlin, the European Cultural Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund Amsterdam and the European Delegation in Damascus, Maraa Media Collective (Bangalore), ASEF Foundation (Singapore) and ArtsNetworkAsia (Singapore).