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@antoniasteffens
Since summer 2022 I have a website- please give it a look, itās great. :)
I will use my Tumblr in the future mainly to share writings, scribbles and anything more exploratory than what is published on my official page.Ā
Thanks for your interest and support,
love, Toni
Today, 8:15pm at Flam Amsterdam, Premiere of Spinner, after a long process with pandemic delay, we are proud and happy to present our show in Amsterdam. <3
Credits:
Performance and Ā Choreography: Toni Steffens, Sigrid Stigsdatter
Lights: Paulina Prokop
Costume: Ginta Tinte
Advise: Maciej Sado
Production and Support: Toni Steffens, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Afk Amsterdam, Dansmakers Amsterdam, 8 Athens- critical laboratory for arts and politics, Veem House for Performance, Bologna CC., New Fears Gallery for Dance and Performance, Batard Festival Brussels, Flam AmsterdamĀ
workspacebrussels is a Brussels based organisation that supports young artists through an intensive residency program, co-productions and coaching.
very excited to spend march in Brussels working on a new project, doing its first baby steps. Thank you Workspace Brussels and Sabine Cmelniski for having me!
āAn Attendeeā, performed at Festival Les Urbaines, Switzerland 2021, photos edit by Gaia LamarreĀ
Terrain dāexpression pluriel et transversal, le festival Les Urbaines recueille les formes et courants Ć©mergents des arts sonores, visuels et performatifs, portant en germe les esthĆ©tiques de demain. EntiĆØrement gratuit, il rĆ©unit au sein de diffĆ©rents espaces de Lausanne, Renens et Chavannes une quarantaine de propositions (Åuvres plastiques, live, DJ sets, performances, ateliers) dans un partage festif et dissonant, qui invite au dĆ©placement des perceptions. Lāexposition Ć lāEspace Arlaud se prolonge jusquāau 12 dĆ©cembre.
Very happy that I will be showingĀ āAn attendeeā at festival Les Urbaines this year, 3rd and 4th of December at Arsenic, Lausanne. This show hasnāt been yet much around and still needs a life to live. As it is always simplified, here the programme text I wrote in full length about this work:
Through a subtle and precarious approach,āAn attendeeā tries to guide the audience perspective into the details of space, along the edge of (un)spectacular events, towards the frictions of different encounters. Small stimulation open up to bigger questions, emotionally and energetically charged, as a single performer finds themself in the company of a set of things, fragments and sounds. Upon encounter they transform into subjects, into micro narratives and locations, sketching out a place of memory, loss and hope, where leftover voices give their account.
As the performer moves along and with them, a precise, soft and concentrated body emerges that tries to attend to these accounts, encapsulated in the environment. In the attempt of overcoming a present state of affair towards another state of āfutureā, the performer has to meet itās own projections, obsessions and internalised violence and wounds.
The practice that this work brings to the foreground tries to investigate the utility of being in a broken place, that a priori to fixing or saving, asks to be embraced with delicacy and care, with trouble, yet attention. The viewer is invited to join and rest in this space too, without pushing for answers, judgement and absolution, and to give in to disquiet.
By looking at ecological philosophies and environmental precarity, effectively supported by an isolating pandemic, Antonia Steffens is investigating anew what the notions of āenvironmentā can mean within the theatrical and artificial realm of the black box. In her practice she refers to the context of visual arts and balancing on the line between two different traditions of mediation, in between spectacle and installation, theatre and still life/exhibition. Being sensitive to western arts traditions, she imitates the "gallery space" to foreground the power of things, objects and more than human reality. Here is where she uses performance and theatre with a notable emphasis on movement to let those things open up, create mystery and discourse, take the lead of the story and question the human body in their arrangement and encounter. An unavoidable aspect of referring to this tradition is to encounter the whiteness of this space, on all levels.
Listen to Episode 3 - Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen & Antonia Steffens, Quinsy Gario by BĆ¢tard Podcast #np on #SoundCloud
Throwback to our wonderful showing ofĀ āSpinnerā at Batard Festival, January 2021 - alongside our performance the team of Batard published podcasts where the artists could share their works and practice through spoken word. Enjoy listening :)Ā
For Come Together Festival Amsterdam, I devoted myself again to the process of āAn Attendeeā - in the reworking of the piece I came to write and organise some thoughts and research topics sourcing and shaping this work. I wrote a kind of diary note from the inside of the process to share it with a very intimate audience. Thanks Come Together for keeping me in the loop <3 :
https://cometogether.amsterdamĀ
Integrated Attention for the soul of things Author: Fransien van der Putt The last 10-day program at Veem House for Performance opened this weekend with āAn Attendeeā by Antonia Steffens. She is seated at the end of the stage, where she awaits her audience. After a very limited number of spectators has found a lonely chair on three sides of the stage and someone hastily rummages around his pocket to then put on glasses, she slowly lowers her back to the ground and it becomes very quiet in the Theater. A painting is spread out there: a dirty white floor as a canvas, surrounded by a deep brown, glossy wooden floor as a frame. Under the chairs against the wall on my opposite side lays a fluorescent pink strip against the plinth. The pink returns on the floor, where next to Steffens' body lie a number of flat shapes, of soft blue and soft yellow polystyrene foam and a somewhat deeper yellow plastic underneath. Layers and rectangles, which are also beds and mats. And a painting in a painting - a white sheet on which rust-brown, dried flowers lie and underneath, some bright pink shapes have been drawn, like wonderful shadows. There is even a vase, hinting at a still life. Only a flat, square brick is somewhat out of place. When Steffens starts moving, her attention is focused on the entire space. Her gaze, body and arms reaching in front of her, like antennas in search of energy, rays and waves, invisible to the eye. They seem to embrace the whole space, wanting to merge with it. Deploying a back chest crawl while moving ahead, a different time is suggested, back- or inward. A few loose tones emphasise the stoic feeling of this feeling. No connection is sought or suggested. Rather, the edges of observation and interpretation are examined. Meta-theater, material research, trying to touch what is potentially present, but not necessarily immediately giving in to the observation. A beautiful dive to the floor recalls the introductory text, in which Steffens writes that āAn Attendeeā is about how the "human species" relates to the grounds of its existence. Or rather misunderstands, because of the gaps and itās those, gaps that characterise the relationship. "The ground and performer appear to alter one another to find details and fractures of missing links, information and memory.ā In the depths of Western culture, resistance and ecofeminism link up with fascism and capitalism, she writes. They are big words, and they hardly relate to the intense attention that Steffens has for the things around her, the human measure she generates with them, or even by deconstructing them as she surrenders to the level of things. Flat, old, withered and broken things, arranged as valuable objects in a larger than life assembly. One by one, Steffens approaches the various objects and plays with them, does small experiments, wonders, wraps up, takes care of and letās go. As some objects acquire more meaning through the interaction, but rather than a scene they are mere beginnings. The question always remains: what occurs here with what? That can go far, for example when Steffens holds her left arm in check when it appears to be giving a hitler salute. But lying on the floor, on a styrofoam bed where she has just put a bundle of branches to sleep, the scene is rather bizarre. A meticulous dance with a broken vase ends in a dialogue. The vase asks her to say her name. "Say my name, say my name. You actin 'kinda shady' is going through my head, and as I write this I think: resistance, betrayal and capitalism? With her attention, Steffens transforms the objects into shapes and positions them next to herself as a performer, without evoking a specific drama, let alone a narrative. Instead, she impregnates the stupid of things with human restlessness, questions, and references, you could also say different modes. The game with references will be anything but a quiz in Steffensā proposal. At no time does she try to beat her audience with knowledge and complexity. But āAn Attendeeā is somewhat like a puzzle with a few very large pieces that are difficult to fit together. Steffens is reminiscent like a puppeteer, but instead of recognisable protagonists (human or animal figures, a cloud or the sun) it is things that move and - as she claims - let move. The devoted attention reminds of the Catholic use of stations. Steffens lacks any reference to religion, when it comes to the great monolithic religions, but the transformation that she initiates in her subtle performance certainly has something of animism. As with many contemporary choreographers, Steffens' work is much more about how we look and give attention than it being about bold or expressive dance. It poses questions about the arrangements in our world, and how historical, political and social grounds continue to resonate and vibrate in our bodies, how they influence feelings and actions, without us always (wanting to) be aware of it. Going straight through fear to the soul of things (instead of letting fear eat that soul, as Fassbinder puts it so beautifully for his '74 film, with the subtitle āAlle TĆ¼rken heiĆen Aliā) is apparently something that has to be done with the body. āWhat happensā is as a junction of forces, imprints and drives, regimes and behaviour, it is a thing between things. It requires a certain distance from will and desire, from knowing and controlling, all those all too human qualities that popular drivers know well about. Patience seems to be another motto of Steffens, given the way she takes time and doesn't give in to producing easy talk and pictures. She holds on to her research and freedom as an artist with integrity, while also putting her own central role into perspective with little jokes. As a spectator, I immediately wanted to see the relatively short performance again and observe it even more calmly, eventually, in a crossover setting, between museum and theater. āYesā to a chair to sit, but not the entertainment I've been thrown to death with all day long. (ā¦) Translated through Antonia Steffens Link to full article: https://www.theaterkrant.nl/recensie/an-attendee/antonia-steffens-veem-house-for-performance/
Beautiful word by Fransien van de Putt about my recent work "An attendee", co produced by Veem House for Performance and NBprojects
Recensie: Met aandacht en geduld bezwangert Antonia Steffens in 'An Attendee' het stomme van de dingen met menselijke rusteloosheid, vragen,
Keerthi Basavarajaiah and me on the co-curation of November 10 x10 at Veem House for Performance.
This summer I became represented artist of the GalleryĀ āNew Fearsā invited by my dear friend and colleague Julian Weber.
NEW FEARS is a gallery for dance and performance, representing Berlin-based and international artists. For each episode NEW FEARS invites 2 artists for a residency in Berlin, which leads to a public event. The process is accompanied by a writer whose output manifests in a publication, launched at the upcoming event.
https://www.newfears.net
For the opening of the gallery, together with my collaborator Sigrid Stigsdatter and in conversation with out Berlin-based advisor Maciej Sado, we worked onĀ āCracksā, that continuously explores our practice:
Cracks is a practice of encountering. Every encounter is true ( even if unreal), no matter how strange or idiotic or absurd it may appear. Here, the unexpected is as well the recognizable space. In the process of opening that space for the other, simultaneously you are figuring it out yourself. And you need to get ready for it to transform again in the hands of the other. Therefore you will have to put yourself ( even if imagined) into the other oneās shoes- what does it feel to walk, on your feet? We are in a fragile space, that cracks open or releases, like a massage. Even if we do not know where we are, the space in between you and the other is constantly affirming itself.If you choose to enter, you might see that you are extremely poor. So poor that there is nothing you ā own", that you could give to the space. Therefore, you might as well be a property of the space itself.Cracks is the design of an experimental hazard. Following their collaborative practice, Sigrid Stigsdatter and Antonia Steffens propose to enter and negotiate spaces in between and to one another in conversation with Choreographer and advisor Maciej Sado. Exceeding the interest of being a duet, the work is situated in a landscape of elements that has to be responded to, activated and re interrogated. Dance and performance is understood as a visible and tangible layer that turns into a manifesto of multiple encounters, narratives and experiences in motion and relation. The work is looking for a state of attendance, in the hope to find new dimensions of possible meaning, logics and yet unknown spaces of existence that drift off track.
About a month a ago, I showed my choreographic research, called for nowĀ āthe attendeeā during Come Together Festival. It was a pleasure to perform it in Frascati 1! What an amazing space. It was pretty scary to show such a fragile and vulnerable research yet extremely informing.Ā
This was the program Text for your interest:Ā 'The attendee' is a choreographic research that deals with environmental questions by studying the concept of co-emergence as an approach to space. In the hope to escape binary notions of subjectivity, the attendee seeks for an extra role, that primary holds and cares for the space of the encounter, in its contra diction. 'Encounter', describing the simultaneity of the processes of āinā and ācontraā as an emergent coexistence, leads performance towards scenarios, where perceivable recordings, translate sensitive meetings that negotiate being rather than confirm it. To per-form (for the form) is understood as the craft of offering ones own material to those encounters. Bracha L. Ettinger, a philosopher and painter, suggests the maternal womb as a space where subjects are always co- emergent, while at the same time difference has to be recognised and negotiated. Taking that space as exemplary, the attendee looks at performance as a intra- subjective encounter and its aesthetic as a manifestation of that relation. The research demands to discover a zone where properties of space, such as motion, subjects, sensation and synergy need to directly and accurately be negotiated at all time, through means of attending. By insisting on the idea that attending something has already agency, the research centres around the proposition that the highly personal way of reading and experiencing oneās environment is a key to coexist and contribute to a multi expressive space. The space is seen as an auto curious environment in which any bodyās specificity is a dancer whoās role may be to distribute and arrange that curiosity.Antonia Steffens is a choreographer and performer based in Amsterdam. Her technical background lies in classical and contemporary dance such as martial arts and long distance running. Her interest in physicality and movement circulates around notions on discipline, meditation, environment, representation, form and philosophy, such as capacities to register and witness something. Throughout her studies she interrogated her modes of creation by introducing ideas on painting. Growing up in a family of painters and having a strong personal history with the medium, the stage and the dance transformed into a practice she designed, called 3D canvas. Working from the notion of what it means to be looked at, imagined, looking back and being invisible, that practice served her for some time to approach and negotiate topics such as body politics, especially in the spectrum of the female identified body, the gaze in human made spaces such as the theatre, the anthropocene and its validation in that space and the notion of being and recognition. The re occurring topic in her work is the undeniable presence of the other as a witness and her ambition is to work on states and modes of performing that can dismantle and externalise this intimate experience, almost to become a vessel for the encounter. Out of the desire to be able to disappear on the stage as a human quality she shifted her focus on topics such as environment, starting to work with objects and materials, sounds and spatial relations. Looking at environmental philosophies, eco psychological approaches and ideas on co emergence, a relatively new practice and political approach towards the theatrical space emerged in her work, which she calls for now, āthe attendeeā. Antonia likes to personify the processes she encounters, so she can deal with them still from the gap of the human space, that happily embraces its limitations. For her, the space of the misunderstanding and the gap where the humans capacity ends and the philosophy of the practice embarks into the unknown is the psychic space or relation and encounter, that so often is out of (the humanās) control.
MANUALIS IN VACUO ( part 1:Ā November 2019)
(intro with a soft hysteric undertone that you can skip but it offers a moody ambient as an entrance):Ā
We donāt need to kick our own ass if we are peaceful beings. Sometimes in masked peace we will encounter situations that kick our ass in such ways, that we will necessarily respond. So the notion of ass kicking is not to take for granted as a necessary ālesson of lifeā itself ( oh how poetic ) but an implicit byproduct ofĀ (mh.. maybe ..?) Capitalism-Ā for those of us that canāt help but being sensitive.Ā
SO NO, these lesson are not meant to produce another product that masks and embodies the masked and embodied violence of a capitalist society.Ā
That would mean to become the provider of a placebo of a lack. Rather TRY (and fail a million times since you swim against the stream to ) to respond to violence, by attempting to demask your environment.Ā
Capitalist realism could also be called:
Me dying from you, you dying from me.
Ā Is it a responsibility? Is there no alternative?
Is it a duty to provide for killing the other?Ā
A force of nature of universe āļøāļøāļø that pretends to romanticise ONLY
Fake gardeners ( since they intervene in the virgin eco system), fake trees (since they pretend to be generous air recycler, but grow only high to overthrow their neighbour tree) , fake sunlight (since without light there would be no brain, but it provides skin cancer in exchange and depressive thoughts)- it seems to me that some basics of capitalism were never and option but always a rule. Seems we have to deal with some basics of being then: Ā
May Darwin win. WIN WIN.
ONLY REAL COMPETITION.
Perma culture is another word for eternal life. Eternal life another word for paradise. Paradise another word for death. Let the middle age fetichism come back. Put your money on the after life.
Since you know better. You extinct.
FOR THOSE STILL ALIVE
When I encountered the void few years ago I made temporary peace with my sexual organ and declared infinite war to each and everyone maintaining psychological intactness in my direct environment. If you look closely, of course, there are not many left, to truly have an upright fight with anyhow ( most of us suffer anxiety, sleep disorder, depression already or still). But there are a lot of those, that for many apparent reasons keep up pretending to maintain psychological intactness. I may call this a coping mechanism.
All of you depressed, suicidal, frustrated, rebelling, confused- all of you are still standing (if you have not died yet) and all of you that did not give in yet even if deformed, distorted, disfigured by us- I love you and it is you I believe in - your depression is a poetic response to the madness around - your tears are thunders releasing tension within a field of human consciousness, completely corrupted in a cloud of dense ignorance of daily inattentiveness.Ā
You are the absolute absolute absolute reason I can be hopeful. Every and each of your doubt is a holy grail, a guideline to paradise.Ā Even if that means we wonāt survive this, which we anyhow wonāt.
When knifes smile to your wrist, balconies invite you to fall off from them, waters seduce you to drown, dreams are your only refuge, but sleep starts to become harder to reach, I have a single one and only solution!!!!!
1st. chapter:
Stay with your environment!Ā STAY STAY STAY.
The remains of a sandwich lie on the ground of a public space. You can see the traces of the teeth that bit of the toast bread, ham and cheese in between. The quality is this cheap paper like bread that cannot really be called bread but is the dutch joke for nutrition. Still, the bread is not responsible for its own ridiculousness- I pity it for being such bread without any pride and respect for the history of bread. But as in pity lies always love, I cannot help but love it. I sincerely honour it for revealing to me the dishonour of those that are in charge of producing it, along side so many other breads, equally dishonoured.Ā
The humiliated bread has its own pride because it is transparently showing to me all that is left of its former idea. And that is indeed very complex, validating and demasking a history of bread and capitalism, nutrition and mass production.Ā
It has dignity by itself because each and every detail of the cosmos has dignity and respect, as long as being attended. It has dignity because it is. And it really is. It truly lies there on the ground, with its whole pride of being.Ā
Some cheese and ham rest inside, or if you want, the elaboration of an idea of value of a cow in our un loyal society, hostile to animals, humans and plants, now presented in a sliced format that can fit perfectly the two bread pieces. Cutting edge technology towards how stupid one should become to grasp ones own nutrition in the manual sense and in the metaphorical one.
They became a temporary company of their own. They ended up being a small family of textures tracing history, half eaten and then thrown on the ground. There, on the ground that is a public space and supposed to be held clean by someone.Ā
Here, someone else, that is not the cleaning personal, disrupted the order. We know the toast should not be there. But here it is, singing silently a song about hope.Ā
Why and how to be hopeful about that sandwich?
Look at the details of the grains, the cheese, the bite trace. Look at what it wants to tell you. It becomes slightly comical, this revelation of dysfunctionality.Ā
It is more than that, it is a real trace, that within the urban habitat, hints towards the fact, that there has been life here. A living thing, a prey for the hunter, which is the human. But first you have to understand what you are looking for, hunting. While looking at the bread, you may hunt for another kind of sense of nutrition. A nutrition, that goes beyond the functionality the bread stands for, which is to feed. Now halfway eaten, halfway used and thrown on the ground its obvious function got dishonoured as it is put into a place where it is deprived from meaning. As it does not invite to be eaten and do its task for nurturing, maybe you that you are looking at it, maybe you look for another kind of nurture, that it has to offer to you. The nurture that lies within the bread on the ground may be in experiencing its functionality by listening to what it has to tell you, in relation to its direct and indirect context.
Yes I know, the context of the public space can seem pretty empty, so scheduled and untouchable, that all you feel is being alienated from any source of nutrition.Ā
You are a hunter deprived from your prey, and instead capitalism gives you a placebo effect that temporary stills and steals your desire to encounter your world by letting you buy sandwiches in supermarkets. That you may then half way eaten, throw on the ground. Here they become a true trace for an alternative nutrition, an alternative prey.Ā
Think about this kind of prey as a prayer. When praying, you might be led to a sense of hope, a nutrition that grants you with a sensation of crating mechanisms of belonging to this world. In the toast bread case, before it becoming your prayer, you need to learn to read the language of the traces, otherwise you cannot become a hunter of the prayer.Ā
So read the bread well. Can you figure, that this trace can bring you out of a labyrinth of mechanisms operating on the appearance of āfor grantednessā in a world where nothing ever was for granted and therefore everything is precious. Even that toast? In days where you had to read your environment in order to survive, the world revealed itself as a speaking scenario, with present, history and future, with character and humour, with multilayered and playful pathways of things and beings ending up and meeting each other. A toast bread would be a curiosity and not a default. It was a place where things could be touched and felt, smelled and seen, interpreted and misunderstood. We were in a speaking world. Not a muted, ignorant one that pretends to be overthrown by algorithms, have clean public spaces, where people eat perfectly packed sandwiches, that disappear in their stomachs as if eating is nothing else but an oiling of the machinery, that has to happen in the meantime of one metro line and another.Ā
The algorithm failed, the toast lies on the floor. Letās start by the hope that the algorithm fails constantly. In minor and major gestures. People will throw the bread on the ground for you to read and at the same time trash the algorithm. Thanks GOD! Or whoever.Ā
So, This is just an example. Look at your world. The toast can speak. It can tell you about its history in just one slightly elongated blink of an eye, where you recognise the toast and what brought it there. Become a listener, a friend to the toast. Half way eaten, humiliated on the ground. And never ever take it for granted for what it is and became since it came there by a complexity of relations.
This is how you learn the language of loyalty with your environment- do that with trees, animals, buildings, empty bottles, rain drops, trash, clothing, packages, super market signs - do that with the back of the neighbour you never talk to, see how it is hunched or maybe in perfect upright position of a spine. but ask yourself if that speaks necessarily for the metaphorical dimension of this person actually having a spine, however.
Stay with your environment. And let it reveal itself to you.Ā Love every message and let it linger and resonate before thinking you know how things have to be, should be, if they have relevance or importance or not. Read your traces as messages from the environment. Let them speak their poetry, songs, their stories and just listen. But you must stay. Stay stay stay stay stay. Reading traces is still the only way to survive.
Why life can always be a gift if you are not totally fucked up, dead sick, traumatised and a victim of mayor relational conflicts of humans and their environment, such as war, crisis, violence and situation where the gift of life is impossible to elaborate on itselfĀ
When you let the traces of your world speak to you, the house wall, lid by daylight, every single brick, the trash on the ground, the colour of the clothes of people in the street, the rattling of the leafs of the trees, the giggling of the water in the rivers, the song of the nightingale in the absurd cold night of November, the weird sound of people using language and laughing about their jokes, will become aware of you, they will start to flirt with your perception, and thank you in showing you how complex, masterfully weird, intense, jolly, annoying but cute, rewarding they can be. When you let those traces reveal how they came into the world in a long and precise development of steps that made love to each other, merged and accumulated, excavated and fought, went through the hole range of whatever their expression and impression of emotionality may be in order to come to being, then you can see each gesture of life as a powerful gift elaborating itself to you. Almost like a daily choir of encounters and things singing and reflecting upon its own sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful existence. That what seems mundane becomes a playground of sensations telling their own story through you, being the perceiving human. If you perceive you make yourself available to receive. If you are able to receive life on a level of such profanity you will encounter richness. Abundance of a sort, that is so mystical, complex, useless in a sense of beyond capital utility, lonely, collective, temporary and fleeting, that you might feel glad to be alive. Not juts glad you will vibrate a sense of aliveness that can connect you to your environment as an intrinsic experience of itself. And you will not feel that alone any longer. Try it for a bit.
More of will you see, lonely drives, defaults and mistakes implemented in a world, that is not perfect. A world that tries to push through its ideologies, desires, ideas, that has a crazy, malicious and fascinating drive of being. Since it loves being so much, and so too much that all that it can think of is to be, All the time. A narcissist choice of an imperative of being that reveals itself in the defaults of relations. Birds fighting for food, cars fighting for space, humans that stop connecting with love, but talk in between the lines, anxiousness of being left to die, disgust towards decomposing materials or toast breads on the ground and so on. There again, is also space for humour, to lean back and discover how decisions are being made, reactions are hysterical ticks, things will be postponed by fear, fear will be clumsily integrated in the bigger picture of traces, organising our life and being and its dramaturgy.
Cynicism in a neoliberal embrace
At some point in the story we have been encountering a desire for organisation and form. The expressing world, the traces that changed in the course of time and locality wanted to get fixed, to hold on to them. With symbols emerged language, as writings, gestures as ambitions for creating, cave drawings, into memoirs, into Torahs, Bibles, practices, into constitutions into positions in between humans in relations to agreements, animals, plants, into functions defining what the drive strives towards. And those into ideas of what serves who and who serves what, into a system we are dying from right now that is not called life only but now also capitalism.
A brand of capitalism behaves as Neo liberalism. As I become a neo liberal being, with every breath I take I immerse myself into the logics of those ropes holding my hands into place, my thoughts on track, my feelings in a rhythm of its metronome, steadily accelerating. It seems an economical structure is embracing me, keeping me alive, and making others die, or vice versa, with every toast bread I buy, every plastic bottle of water I consume, every job I say yes to, as a contribution to a bigger picture. An annoy of my own voice rages inside me, comes to judge upon my feeling, saying: we know that. Bring me solutions, bring me answers. Or shut up. I know this annoy is a byproduct of my fear of being submitted to the structure. A byproduct of a history of separating content and form. I am the content that holds the form, I think. The form indoctrinates me with content, with what I am, I think. Very Brecht. This idea of the product of environment.
As I choose to shut up, to not bother myself, the other or the ideology, what expresses in me is an alternative of some cynical sort. So cynical that tears show up to resist the bitterness of a system that entered us in our most private and intimate encounters of our world, our friends, our steps, our relations and choose to corporate anything and anyoneās effort to make sense of their own being. A system that tries to keep us away from making use of our ability to read our world, to talk to our world, to listen to our world. There it comes dark and sad. Cynicism.. it feels toxic but at the same time it measures my engagement simply in a cryptical way, diminishing a message underneath that might be coming from a true desire to express. Letting it revolt my fake humbleness of shutting up and showing me the face I carry out while facing a mask of a world.
The cynicism is a form of hope. So donāt you disguise it when it comes your way. And its only way of being operative is by choosing to customise itself in the form of a dark joke. But again, if you were to read your traces well you would not ignore the cynical dimension of life and try to read its origin, so keep in mind my hint: STAY with it. When it comes our way. Stay.
So here it comes:
The handbook for spineless beings in post somatic realism. For dancersĀ and non dancers and people that lack a sort of directionality or have terrible back pain. How to live without loyalty. Ā
The era of centre is over. There is no central authority, giving direction to the system. There is no central exchange. Emerging decentralised markets are connecting sellers to buyers by peer-to-peer trading. Exchange is not a meeting point of different interests but an operative chain of motion, weaving a web through gigantesque and sensible systems of advertisement and promotions, connecting the ā(a)likeā minded in a market philosophy that works through confirmation rather than communication. We congratulate each other and shake hands. The perpetuation of the 20th century ontologies, that are based on the idea of use and abuse, implode in an infinite chain of copy-paste algorithms, that completely deprive anything and anyone from being worthy enough to be seen on a distinctive expressive level of being a being, that can speak and move, humans, animals, plants, objects, matter in its singularity and in its encounter with matter. Capitalism has led us into a world where we can only think in quantities, in masses, in fragmentation against a sum of things, where this equals and unequals that. On the other side, waves of identity politics emerge, calls from perspectives that are over jumped, overran by those that cannot make sense or money out of the perspective of difference, or those that are simply āriding a ( for some king of reason mysteriously unquestioned) waveā of a career. As Bracha Ettinger describes it well, the phallocentric psychoanalyst world view is a binary one. It is you or the other in the oedipal conflict, marked by the fear of castration. And the other side of that thought is indeed the naive idea of eternal and infinite symbiosis. In both cases ādifferenceā cannot be acknowledged. Neoliberal societies then throw identity politics back into the machinery, where they become a distributable good in the decentralised organism of production and consumption. When everything can be consumed, nothing matters. Matter is just there to be strategically dispersed, organised, being made available, demystified, objectified and distributed. No one sees the matter crying, dying, being compressed into toast bread, being compressed into depression. An idea of matter has triumphed over spirit, like the tarot card of the 5 of swords:
Geburah(Severity on the Tree of Life) always supplies disruption. In the 5 of Swords, Venus rules Aquarius which implies weakness rather than excess of strength. Hence, weakness is the cause of the disaster. Here, one has succumbed to the body's fear of discomfort, and losses the will to "fight on". If you're still breathing, you can't be defeated, for the Soul is the one who provides the breath in the body. So your immortal "secret lover", is still within you. However, if you are not in communication with your soul, because your identity is controlled by "fear of rejection" and/or the survival mind of the material world, whom you have made as Foundation/ Master of your own body, you'll be defeated by your own fear of death, which translates into all other fears.Ā
To deprive matter but also to deprive the moment when something matters, from its own sensibility is the ignorant core of a capitalist and neoliberal society. What is deeply connected to this ignorance, is the fear of meaninglessness āthat nothing mattersā once the system of value collapses. The idea of being or having to encounter a sort of nothingness is still the core believe driving the binary of āto be or not to beā.Ā
Once the sneaky mask, identifying and distributing our values ( good, thoughts, relations) for the favour of that binary, which means giving value to only parts of the environment and the inhabitants while devaluing others parts of the environment and exploiting their inhabitants as unworthy of being- once this mask was to slide down- what could it mean for our goods, thoughts, relations, how could they bloom, flourish, express what they always had to say? Could that maybe happen if one was to give up- And then what is to truly give up? Is it just to give away? How to give up even?Ā
I say it is about reanimating our perception towards an intelligence, sensibility and spirit of the forms we encounter and let them express what they do, can do, could do. To understand that these forms are never fixed and always in vibration through communication. Even the toast bread wants to communicate. It is a form that wants to have a form of conversation with its environment, one could say.Ā
A form of conversation means that conversation is a form. A form of something that can livingly exchange and express itself through an architecture or a system, incorporating different expressions that encounter one another. So if capitalism itself could be seen as such a conversation could we think of altering the way how we speak and listen to one another within that relation. If we were doomed to capitulate to that form, as the only possible way of living, we truly had no alternative. We were truly speechless and in ourselves unintelligible to exchange. We were to make an important mistake, as Negarestani explains in Intelligence and Spirit:
if concepts themselves are absorbed by capitalism, then the very idea of capitalism becomes ineffable.Talking about capitalism and diagnosing its pathologies will then be little more than exercises in producing subjective and arbitrary narratives about something that is, in truth, unintelligible.
What does that mean? It may mean that by capitulating capitalism, we cut off ourselves from our own ability to converse in intelligible manner. Intelligence here means maybe not the driving force of creation in a product orientated sense, but a creation of a movement, or of many movements. Movements that can vibrate and alter the form and course of beings. Therefore one has to start to see forms as beings and beings as flexible, elastic encounters of vibrating matter, with frequencies that have a temporal appearance and structure but which are always fragile, malleable as they are always in relation to a synergy of a conversation. That synergy, that conversation our forms are taking part into, can alter the forms, can change their vibration. Synergy is the idea that a conversation is a meeting of energies that can alter each others frequency and therefore no form ever can be considered as something fixed. Not a thought, not a stone, not an idea, not a foundation. Let us step back further and further from the form as a fixed encounter towards forms as fluid, intelligent moments of exchange.
As our intelligence creates movement, our perception renders into our attention the intelligence of our environment. Through relation we are able to create thoughts, ideas, an attempt to express our poetics into the space we inhabit. Which means we attempt to attend that space. Again, these attempts to attend are not to be confused with fixed views, but rather temporal spirits and inspirations that chant towards and in the meeting with our environment. The meetings become tangible as movement traces, incorporating the reflection of past events and the hope or desire for future vibrations.
Here and very important when elaborating those, we need to make sure that the creations of those movement traces, which can be our identity politics, our socio-political ambitions, our dreams and hopes wonāt be eaten up and incorporated as ready-made sellable products within the neoliberal ideology of a corpus itself.Ā
Going back to the neoliberal decentralised market, one might recognise that wether by default or strategy, this market is often targeting our most intimate and private relations and takes our goods, that is sometimes all that we have, in order to feed it ideology of movement and finally product orientated organisation. How those encounters are being capitalised upon is mostly more easily felt for, letās say, a freelancer working within a small community, than a worker in a big company. But what is urgent to understand by all of us, is that the system we operate inside of, where each and every gesture we place into, has a real effect and creates a direct reality to the world we inhabit and thus, right back at us.Ā
Acknowledging the intimate conversation at the threshold of each encounter with the neoliberal system is a first step towards altering the communication we can have with and inside of it. SO again STAY STAY STAY.
Let me dare to make an analogy. If we see the loss of centre as having psychological and physical consequences within our bodies or body-beings, what would it mean to us as individuals and our way of moving and being moved within a neoliberal, decentralised fluctuation. Instead of one centre, we encounter a couple of centres that take over the conversation around value, on different levels of existence. Being doomed to being, being doomed to survive, the body-being will experience a certain stream or locomotion that it has to follow up with and feed such being fed by. True critic is suicide, as it appears that a true critic will only catapult you out of what seems to be the only choice in the 21st century.
I dare to say, that as we are pulled and pushed around and against this mechanism of decentralisation, we become deprived from directing our own intelligence to make conversations with our environment. As the era of centre is over, the era of conversation and direction as well. What is masked in the idea of ādecentralisationā is not that power truly exists and operates, that is pretty obvious and smoothly functioning. Whats is masked instead is rather the notion that someoneās actions and motion can be held responsible, that someone can enter a conversation and their activity can leave a trace in the environment to reveal what brought it there, for what reason, with which agenda and default mechanism. That trace that leads into communicating with the environment is what is masked by the operation of decentralisation. The only loyal environment to hold on to is one that is in a complete state of flux with a constant alteration of āwhat a frontā is and āwhat it means to confront something or someoneā, and thus multi-directionality acting upon the directions of the body-being and its attempt to receive and direct expressions from its environment.Ā
One could also say that attention will be all the time distracted producing a sort of soccer play, where the eye of the mass is focused on the ball and not on the environment and in a hypnotic survival exctacy the bigger picture will have to be left out. The focus is permanent but what to focus on is forever exchangeable.Ā
When the social being, the human being is deprived from its way of directing conversations and attending its environment, by such manner the physical and psychological experience results ultimately in a loss of communication finally resulting in a general āloss of spineā, as the delicate arrangements of vertebras collapse inside the speed of a vortex and the stretch of a hyper elastic moral, being twisted and intertwined, for whatever reason may sell us further. Spineless beings. Spineless beings that cannot attend one another.
This happens not just in the human bound body but also in the body that binds humans to generate bigger corporations, as in communities, collectives, scenes. And here is where intimacy get corrupted into a game, that I am not sure who wants to really play it in the end.
Thank you Veem House for Performance and 8 Athens, critical Institute for Arts and Politics to develop our work Spinner further. February had been a month full of miracles for us and I am happy to share some impressions of our presentations, that happened in 21. and 22. of February. Pictures have been taken by Paulina Prokop, who also designed our light and will be further involved supporting the staging our the work when it will premier in Amsterdam in June. Spinner is a collaboration in between Antonia Steffens and Sigrid Stigsdatter.
And the last one- Spinner today and tomorrow at @veem.house with @motherbikini and @p.lina.prokop ( Video credit ) - come and have a look šš https://www.instagram.com/p/B81NKWuFuLA/?igshid=15159cuit9wla
Come join our presentations friday and Saturday 8pm š¬š¬š¬ https://www.instagram.com/p/B8ygPxpFSSf/?igshid=12w6j8a364qes
Speculative empathy in veem this weekend. Join us ! ( yep we coined this term for all you philosophy nerds šā¤ļø) 21/22nd at 8pm - light design and Video by Paulina Prokop @p.lina.prokop ! https://www.instagram.com/p/B8wK9zhJqU1/?igshid=1w94twfhynelf