Over one day, the participants will draw trajectories linking notation/prototype/model to the final oeuvre, reconstructing the process of creation in space and in time.
At first, the participants will be provided with a short theoretical background for the exercise.
The participants, assembled in subgroups, will be assigned several images of artistic processes. We shall assume that the process whose image is standing in the middle precedes, chronologically speaking, those of the images touring around it, and refers to the so-called notation/prototype/model which informed the others. The challenge is to imagine how originally it was possible to go from the first outcome to the following ones. Three broad mapping methodologies will be proposed, all of them involving the body and its movement, material and its interaction with the body and tracing in space. Just like the traces, material and body movements shall be recorded.
At the end, we should be able to answer some questions: how did you reach the conclusion about what is the most plausible mapping in space and time between notation and the oeuvre? How did you make decisions with your partner(s)? What avenues did you initially explore and end up rejecting over the course of the experiment? And why did you reject them? Additional meta-questions will be asked: Does this exercise come closer to a rational reconstruction or to a historic reconstruction? What notion of time is implicit in your exercise? How did you body behave over the experience, what did if feel, what did it learn? And how did your vision/sight perform, how did it travel, what did it learn?
Unlike many performing conditions (forgive us for the pun), a small cash award (50 euros) will be given to the winning team or individual, to be chosen according to a fairly democratic rule presented at the beginning of the workshop.
All participants are welcome. Performers with an eye for the visual arts, or visual artists with a leg for performance, are particularly welcome.
___________________________________________________________________
Performance and visual artist. currently living in Brussels. Erik is an award-winning social scientist, having completed in 2012 a Phd on poverty issues. He is currently enrolled in the Phd on Arts and Sciences of Art of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, researching on the feasibility of an ethics-empowered aesthetics. As a visual artist, he has gone from wall constructions to installations, increasingly exploring the performed aspects of the process of artistic creation. His performances stem from what is called “material performance” and frequently engage the membrane. They include “Northern Lights (recast)” (Encontros Baldios 2013, Espaço Alkantara, Lisbon), “Performance for Paper and One Dancer” (La Bellone, Brussels), “Development of an Arm” (Centro de Arte Graça Morais, Bragança) and “The making of “Untitled”” (Gc de Maalbeek, Brussels). Prized researcher in the context of the Gulbenkian Programme for the Stimulus to Research.
