Breaking the Spell
How do you sustain your practice when the local ground becomes hostile?
‘Breaking the Spell’ is an artistic research project that reflects practices of thinking- and being-with in performing arts. It is an artistic research project that reflects practices of thinking- and being-with in performing arts. is a temporary space of common learning and mutual support for artists, curators and thinkers who challenge the dominating, exhausting working modes in the arts and who desire to understand how to make art in the moment of loosing the world as we knew it.
Artists and thinkers: Aleksandra Borys, Charlotte Eifler, Begüm Erciyas, Samara Hersch, Caroline Kapp, Marta Keil, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Bodies of Knowledge (Joana B Polge), Agata Siniarska, Stefanie Wenner, Anna Majewska, Ingrid Vranken, Zuzanna Berendt, Silvia Bottiroli and Lina Majdalanie are coming to VIERNULVIER to share their practices.
The artistic practices of being- and thinking-with practice solidarity instead of competition, question the figure of an individual genius, experiment with various ways of (re)building relations with collaborators and with the publics, focus more on a practice than a singular presentation, take a risk of inviting the unknown to take space. In consequence, they offer and reflect new political languages and perspectives for performing arts (and beyond), that we need more than ever before. We would like to understand how the methods of being-with in the contemporary performing arts, that are situated in a local context, can be useful on a transnational level. Can we support each other while our perspectives are shaped by different landscapes? What can we see while our feet stand firmly on our local ground and thoughts are being formed with colleagues and interlocutors situated elsewhere? How might this constellation influence the way we think, work and gather? As Verónica Gago, an Argentinian political philosopher and one of the leaders of the movement #NiUnaMenos, pointed out: “we don’t know what we’re capable of until we experience the displacement of the limits that we’ve been made to believe and obey.”
Curated by Marta Keil in cooperation with Residenz Schauspiel Leipzig, Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich, Performing Arts Institute in Warsaw, and VIERNULVIER.
Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
