WORKSHOP - Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change

By -

 

Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change


Through a series of individual and group tasks of reading, writing, discussing, questioning, designing and testing, this workshop will involve students in a critical process that aims to reflect on the relation between curatorial practices and social change. In this frame, we will approach the design of any curatorial project as an artificial construction site for the creation of alternative social imaginaries, i.e. as a concrete alternative proposal about the way we imagine and practice our social coexistence. The act of curating will, thus, be worked as a practice that moves away from established norms and social habits; as the crafting of social encounters towards more imaginative, unknown directions, away from capitalist demands that strive for the ‘groundbreaking’, the ‘new’, the ‘successful’, the controllable, popular, profitable and effective product.
Key terms in our exploration will be the notions of ‘social imaginary’ (as discussed by C. Castoriades and other scholars), ‘dramaturgy as working on actions’ (as discussed in The Practice of Dramaturgy – Working on Actions in Performance, a book co-authored by the workshop’s facilitator), ‘commoning’ (as a concrete practice within the discourse on ‘commons’), as well as the relation between art, crafts and materiality. Students will be asked to read texts in advance related to all these issues, which will be further discussed and tackled in the workshop.
In the same frame, students will also be asked to design and, at least partly, test different curatorial frames and exchange models that could act as artificial social imaginaries, through which they will attempt to detect the processes and working principles involved in such acts.

 

 Workshop with Danae Theodoridou  

Topic Tags:  emotionality social imagination Hannah Arendt withdrawal

Question game:

- How can curation work as a process of communing?
- What exactly is a process of communing?
- Why do we need to define something in order to do it?
- How can we do something without defining it?
- Who is defining what we’re doing?
- Who has the correct answers?
- How can we produce our own answers?
- What if we start thinking about honesty?
- How to provide a hierarchy of multiple perspectives?
- How to work with multiple perspectives?
- How to shift one perspective to another?
- How can I listen to perspective to someone else without forgetting my perspective?
- How can I have more than one perspectives?

- How do I approach working with others as not a frame an agreement?
- How do I stand on my ground?
- What is the power of giving in?
- What happens when I don’t give in, but don’t agree?
- How much time is needed in order to decide whether I agree or I give in?
- Why is it important to make fast decisions?
- How do I feel like I have time?
- What sort of pace do I use the most?
- What is the difference between the actual time given and the experience of having time? Or How is it possible to have half an hour and feel like that you have time, and have half an hour and feel like you don’t have time?
- What if procrastination is not procrastination?
- What are the gradients of not doing?
- How can laziness be productive?
- Can we name laziness as nesting something?
- What if nastiness was nasty nest? What happens when we change a nest to a nest?

 

·         Institutions as traps?

·         Frustration of art in relation to its political force

·         Art: only an attempt?

·         Community withdrawal: need for community?

·         Immediate community: returning to the materiality of the event

·         Relation to others and common decision-making processes

·         Emotionality: crying, helplessness, caving inside, withdrawal

·         In order to return to emotionality and forces of community that capitalism has alienated us from: we have to spend the time of crying

·         Curation as a process of commoning

·         "The guts to give in" - bravery and giving in

·         Giving in as political action

·         When is something not an action? 

·         Hannah Arendt's definition of action

 

 

Documents:

3 principles for Dramaturgy DT.pdf

Performing Arts and Social Imagination_DT.pdf

 

Danae Theodoridou is a performance maker and researcher based in Brussels. She studied literature and linguistics in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and acting in the National Theatre of Northern Greece. She completed her PhD on dramaturgy of contemporary theatre and dance at the Roehampton University in London. The past years, her artistic work focuses on the notion of social imaginaries and the way art can contribute to the emergence of social and political alternatives. At the same time, Danae teaches in various university departments and art conservatoires of theatre and dance in Europe, curates practice-led research projects and presents and publishes her research work internationally. She was co-creator of Dramaturgy at Work (2013-2016) and co-author of The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017).

 For more information visit www.danaetheodoridou.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Popular posts from this blog

PUBLIC DISCUSSION / ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS / COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES /

By -
Image
    PUBLIC DISCUSSION/// ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS /// COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES///  Jasmina Založnik, dramaturge, writer and producer /  Paz Ponze, independent curator, writer & researcher of contemporary artistic creation / Jovanka Popova curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje / Mira Gakjina, senior curator at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Skopje      Moderators: Biljana Tanurovska – Kjulavkovski and Slavco Dimitrov      Jasmina Založnik is a dramaturge, publicist and producer primarily engaged in the field of contemporary dance. Over the last years, she has focused on recent histories of contemporary performing art and choreography, and their multiple relations to everyday life. She is interested in strategies of social politicization and emancipation. Her work is mainly developed in a dialogue with various colleagues, most often in close collaboration with Rok Vevar w...
Read more

SEMINAR – Suzana Milevska: Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator

By -
Image
SEMINAR – Suzana Milevska (North Macedonia): Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator Abstract :  Topic Tags: Curating curatorial curator offspring curatorial agency In recent times, curating has provided a point of cross-disciplinary interchange between several distinguished disciplines and professions that deal with art. The courses and university departments that initially taught curating as a subject mainly focused on its practice, but such a dichotomy no longer exists now that curating is taught as a subject or course in many different departments and universities, and the term itself is used in a much broader terms. This presentation will therefore address the question how the concept of curatorial relates to both the theory and practice of curating. I want to argue that “curatorial” and “curatorial knowledge” have advanced into terms that encompass the condition in which philosophy, theory and epistemology are intertwined and produced a new discourse and culture th...
Read more

ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS by Barbara Bryan / presentation of her work in Movement Research

By -
Image
  ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS///  Barbara Bryan, Executive director of Movement Research New York, independent art producer and curator/// presentation of her work as a curator and executive director in Movement Research///   ABSTRACT:   As the Executive Director of Movement Research, my role is to innovate curatorial and programmatic structures that hold space for the amplification of artists’ voices in curation and programmatic planning. My goal is to conceive fluid and malleable formats that support evolving and emergent practices, and new voices in the field. Questions that I ask from a curatorial framework are how to be responsive, rather than reactive, to evolving discourse and trends in experimental dance and the intersections of socio-political contexts and activism? How do we develop frameworks that have flexibility built in to the fabric of the format, and thus are not formulaic, but rather are ideations that can be stretched, reshaped and reimagined by ...
Read more

Artists and Curators Talks with Kristina Lelovac and Jana Kocevska (Tiiit Inc.)

By -
Image
  Artists and Curators Talks with Kristina Lelovac and Jana Kocevska (Tiiit Inc.) Topic Tags:   festival feminism intersectionality independent cultural scen e co-creation   ·          Prvo pa Zhensko Festival (First Born Girl) ·          Program structure: balancing theory, art, popular content ·          Festival production core values: togetherness, inclusiveness, intersectionality, solidarity ·          Building communities and audiences to breed alliances ·          Co-creation between organizations, institutions, individuals ·          Supported from local independent cultural scene ·          Prvo Pa Zhensko Festival 7 video: https://tiiiitinc.com/public/index.php/en...
Read more