Practice-based course, with embodied theory, on performance or action art. Starting from specific bodily and mental experiences, we will live this art by acknowledging presence, time, and space.

Performance Art: presence, time and space

This module focuses on the relationships between embodiment, presence, action, space, and the perception of time. It conceives performance art as an expressive, political, and creative medium from diverse perspectives and contemporary realities. It investigates how the alteration of space directly influences the perception of temporality and vice versa. It explores and acknowledges that time is perceived and conceived in radically different ways depending on cultural geopolitics and subjective experiences.
We will explore how performance art exposes and problematizes themes of identity, memory, politics, ethics, and coloniality, as well as the relationship between art and its audiences. The bodily concepts and theories to be explored will be exemplified with texts and works by artists, but above all, they will be experienced through practical exercises that will focus on the aesthetics, composition, concept, motivation, and execution of individual and collective actions, both brief and durational.

Participants: Martí Sancho, Helena Da Costa Sanmartín, Núria Duran, Loles González, Blau Orduña Claverol, Helena Pons, nicole vindel, Lluvia, Mireia Mateo and Adrià Sánchez Campo.

PROGRAM

Objectives

_To live and create performance actions through presence (ourselves), time (nowness) and space (the reality that surrounds us).
_Understanding ourselves as a political-affective geography.
_To reconnect with the memories of our bodies as the raw material of our actions.
_To develop the necessary tools to carry out individual, simultaneous and collective performance actions, both durational and brief.
_Create actions in conventional and unconventional spaces.
_To establish an intuitive communication between the object and our own body.
_To create a political aesthetic of presence and the ephemeral, which resists representation.
_Activate a critical perspective of the reality that surrounds us and use performance to create other possible realities.

Contents

We will experience performance through the philosophy and poetics of subversive love and extreme care. We will understand ourselves as corporeal and political geographies, affective and affected, identity-based and border-bound, ritualized and collective.
Specific exercises and dynamics will be offered throughout the course to enhance individual and collective experiential knowledge, enabling the creation of a variety of performance pieces. Presentations related to the themes explored will also be given, along with viewings of artistic proposals from diverse geopolitical and cultural contexts. Throughout the course, performance proposals will be developed with creative and aesthetic guidance.
The course will be developed from three sections that will always be interconnected: presence, time and space.
Through the physical, material and energetic presence of the “here and now”, we explore the relationship of performance as an event affecting and affected by the person/s performing, the audience and the living environment. Through specific acts and proposals of self-knowledge and individual-communal intuition, we will work on altered states of being that will reveal the politics of the body within an ephemeral community.
We will perform durational and brief actions; in this way we can consider new notions of time that break the imposed sensations of the temporal, linked to capitalist productivity. We will explore the multiplicity, fixation, repetition, rituality, and modification of time.
Different spaces are investigated (public/private, domestic/institutional, natural/urban, etc.) proposing their activation, alteration, dislocation and memory. Presence will be emphasized in conventional and unconventional spaces, decontextualizing them and giving them new poetics, symbolisms and signifiers.
“Site-specific” actions will be created to respond to the spaces and their physical, functional, aesthetic, contextual and socio-political characteristics.

Metodology

This course understands practice as embodied theory. The bodily concepts and theories to be explored will be discussed and exemplified with texts and works by artists, as well as experienced through the participants’ bodies via the proposed exercises. We will work both individually and collectively, questioning and rethinking both terms. Performance projects will be developed from the corporeal-sensory exploration of each individual and the community created during the course.

Bibliography

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