I assume that most artists who make work can recognize themselves once in a while sitting in the audience with a hurt ego thinking “Fuck, this is what I am working on”. And we can rarely be certain of whether projection, collective consciousness or randomness is at play. Last spring, no more than three performances on seals (yes the mammal sea creature?!) premiered in Stockholm and I remember well in 2018, when choir singing was spreading, as if no other choreographic form had relevance. One thing that we can, however, be certain of is that the culture we produce can not be separated from the culture we consume, and this is something that the artist-driven festival MIND EATER run by Louis Schou-Hansen and Runa Borch Skolseg makes me acutely aware of.
Runa and Louis are not curators and I am not a critic. As artists we have encountered each other several times in contexts for performing arts. I admire their work and try to ask myself why. I think it has to do with how they manage to position their work both in relation to a history that precedes them whilst being conscious of current political and aesthetic tendencies. Surely MIND EATER is no exception, I am from the start aware of their fingers firmly placed on the pulse of today’s crisis-ridden society. Some former examples of the duo’s critical contextualisation is an interview on Louis’ performance Afterlife published online by Oslo International Theater Festival 2022. Here they discuss the possibility of re-writing history as an artist, counter factualness as an artistic strategy and critique the Nordic performing arts institutions half hearted attempts at decolonizing their programs (1). In 2020 Louis organized the discursive platform Brakkesnakk together with Inés Belli inviting peers into public conversations on dance and choreography. In 2019 I participated in the seminar Working Title that posed the initial question “What do we mean when we talk about practice?” (2) organized by Runa together with Nikhil Vettukattil, Alexandra Tveit and Marie Ursin. The symposium framed the notion ‘Practice’ which had been trending within dance for some time. By inviting visual artists, poets, theater and dance makers to present their practice the seminar opened up for new critical approaches to understand the width and limits of this notion. All of the above-mentioned artists are present at MIND EATER taking on roles as hosts, producer, performer and participants in the program. They remind me of the non-institutionalized art scene in Oslo that the festival originates from and contributes to.
Since I returned home to Stockholm from the festival weekend in mid August it feels like I have been in a tivoli for thoughts, it is especially the title of the festival that has consumed my time. In addition to the performance programme that took place at UKS I also participated in the writing workshop Fuck Me Up: writing sex and textual revolt with Star Finch and a reading group led by Nikhil. These two activities made up the festival’s discursive programme and were hosted at separate locations. At Mette Edvardsens bookshop and project space Norma-T we are seated around a large table. We receive instructions with limitations and forms for articulating sexual fantasies in writing. It is very cringe and sometimes cute and funny. We read our texts out loud to each other and it gets a bit easier as time passes. The task at the workshop that interests me the most is a cut-up exercise where we insert the gay erotic fiction that accumulates in the workshop into an already existing text. For this task we are asked to appropriate a text that represents the status quo and that has political authority in our society. One participant chose the Norwegian law, another a christian christmas song and I am excited to destroy the tech-investor Peter Thiel’s manifesto The Education of a Libertarian. After three hours of reading out loud from Iris Murdoch’s 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea we go on to read from a theoretical paper by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza on the moral philosophy in Murdoch’s work, the chapter we read has the title What is ethical about attention? (3) With this question we float on an unsteady bathing dock at the tip of Tjuvholmen, a little human-made island designed by the real estate firm Selvaag Eiendom in central Oslo. It is the warmest and last day of the festival and we don’t get further than a paragraph into the theoretical text before the five of us still present on the undulating dock have reached the limit of our capacity to pay attention, dulled by the hours of sun.
I am asking myself how these two discursive proposals relate to one another or have something to do with the performances presented at the festival. After giving it some thought it is clear to me that the writing workshop proposed fantasy and fiction as an artistic strategy whilst the theoretical text on moral philosophy on the other hand values truth and reality. Panizza argues that paying attention to reality is an ethical act in itself, one that brings us closer to the truth. But where do we draw the line between fiction and truth? The erotic descriptions from the writing workshop brings about a reality otherwise taboo and not permitted visibility in most social settings and Nikhil teaches us that Iris Murdoch was a philosopher that chose to write fiction, and produced theory in the form of novels. Clarity and understanding is not something I gain from participating in these discursive setups, but they bring about rich and complicated experiences and I am left disoriented with a sense of a friction, a friction that frames my perception of the performances at MIND EATER; This Resting, Patience by Eva Dziarnowska, Wild Tanks: Halogen Daylight Springtime by Ivan Cheng, Masterpiece by Louisa Fernanda Alfonso and A Short History of Necromantic Gender Transgressions by Odete.
A brief statement online claims that MIND EATER focuses on performative practices, and except from the shift of location there is not much of a hierarchy between the discursive formats and the performances at UKS. This makes me consider the collective writing and reading situations as equally performative experiments where the festival visitors’ engagement is required. There is no linear relation between the different formats, the discursive programme does not explain the content or meaning of the performances, and engagement is also required from the spectator who visits the above-mentioned performances taking place in UKS’ high ceiling gallery. At UKS the audience is invited into choreographed set ups, where each performance provides specific structures for participation. In Cheng’s work we have to choose a role; as witness or as an actor in a filmed restaurant visit, and in Odete’s work we navigate in the dark around a dimly lit paper roll. The rules of the gallery space allows for shifting position and moving around whilst witnessing, and the performances provide me with time and space to contemplate through my most diffuse and experiential intellectual capacities. Neither the discursive programme nor the performances themselves give any explanations, they all have complex and layered forms and this makes me feel like I am trusted to process what I experience with my own imagination. For this reason MIND EATER is both a challenging and exciting programme to take part of. The “sketched” character of the work of Odete and Cheng is in my opinion not a lack in quality, as Marte Reithaug Sterud claimed in a critique at Scenekunst.no. On the other hand I would argue that the works have a ‘Formal Openness’, that produces uncertainty in the room. The performances are open to what might enter and the performers are ready to produce a relation to the particular behaviour and actions of its spectators, something that could change from one time to another. This is an important characteristic of MIND EATER’s performative experiments and it is what constitutes the specificity of the festival’s curatorial proposal. This is also how the programme rejects a presupposed singular perspective, instead of simply sitting down on a chair in a line, each spectator is forced to choose their own position or path alongside others when attending to the collective spaces of the festival. Perception therefore appears as a choreographed act, and to me this opens up sensible meetings that I need to think about. By breaking down theatrical monumentality and virtuosity that too often frame choreographic work today MIND EATER presents performance as contemporary art. Alfonso’s deconstruction of character dance in Masterpiece both impresses and touches me, but seated frontally stuck on my chair in a theatrical setup this is the only point in the festival where MIND EATER’s daring contract of spectatorship is broken.
I can’t recall when I forgot the actual title of the festival, something I recently discovered in a conversation with a friend. I remember using google to figure out if the subject that the festival title invoked in my imagination had a body. I wanted to know what this body looked like and what its capacities were. Among the content appearing on my laptop screen as I push enter are band camp profiles in the genres of punk, death metal and hardcore. A Korean fantasy creature, green and muscular, has a tongue in its forehead that it uses to suck out its prey’s brain juice. A self-help book for children depicts the monster as an octopus “Brain Eater can pull our attention away from what we are supposed to be doing when we are using our brains to focus on things at school or home.” The independent science fiction film The Brain Eaters from 1958 embodies the monster as leechelike parasites that attach to their prey’s neck to induce a toxin into their nervous system. Wikipedia teach me that the indie film was sued for plagiarizing a novel. Earlier this year the theory book Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater by Sergio Benvenuto was published. I find a lecture by Benvenuto on youtube where he states something like “Language never comes from ourselves but from the big other, the collective discourse from which we are part. Everything is plagiarism. What is creation? To say something new that is not a repetition of what has been said we insert variation. The condition of writing is copying. In order to think our own thoughts we need to repeat those of others.“
The line “What the world needs now is love sweet love” from Dionne Warwick’s 1966’s hit repeats whilst I gradually land in Dziarnowska’s three hour performance This Resting, Patience. Despite the expectations given by the title it is a rather busy work with a lot of action, costume shifts and regular rearrangements of the audience’s chairs. The choreographer performs the duet with Leah Marojević and in my experience the incoherence of the varied movement material that make up this work is held together by a sensitive and layered soundscape by Krzysztof Bagiński. Laying on my side I allow the weight of my head to rest and my face to sink into the blue carpet that covers the floor. Earlier I was sitting on a chair on the opposite side of the room discovering a plushy soft fur with my fingers. I remember sitting on that chair as both performers approached me through an unorganized slowness. It looked like they were falling apart, as if they were heading in all and no directions at once and therefore their arrival by my feet surprised me. I observed the two bodies giving into gravity, vibrating just centimeters away from my pants. Their head, chest and shoulders tipping off the vertical axis that have come to define humans as cultural and erect beings. What interests me the most with this performance is how it turns movement material that appears to be random into synchronized and repeated acts. It reveals the choreography, but maintains its randomly looking form. As I experience the same sequence happen on the floor a second time around, my memory from the chair is still present in me. These repetitions make the structures of This Resting, Patience perceivable. I observe the repetitions in the work like waves on the sea affirming the existence of wind or cars passing on a highway manifesting a work oriented oil dependent society. These are all choreographies that allow me to surrender as a witness, they allow my imagination to wander whilst I am left considering the forces that move humans socially, philosophically, economically and environmentally. In This Resting, Patience the performers sometimes turn into masses of material moving as if structured by a force beyond the individual’s control.
But what exactly is the difference between a Mindeater and a Braineater? Veganism? Anorexia? Celibacy? Whilst buddhist, phenomenologists, feminists and contemporary dancers have stood strong against the dominating intellectual narratives of the west, arguing that there is no such thing as a split between the body and the mind, that humans literally think with movements, through touching and feeling, through flesh, muscles and skin Descartes’ (the French philosopher famous for saying “I think, therefore I am”) model of the mind as control center over the body as machine still prevails as dominant in western systems for knowledge and common sense.
“Anthropophagy alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
[…]
I am only interested in what isn’t mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagous.
[…]
Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the prelogical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.”
In Manifesto Antropofagico (Sometimes translated as the Cannibalist manifesto) from 1928 the Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade eats western culture as a postcolonial artistic strategy. The Manifesto plays with the cannibalistic rites of the indigenous population of Brazil, which Portuguese colonisers used to justify their violent inforcement of christian moral codes.The rite (it is debated whether it was practiced) was allegedly about eating the enemy to incorporate their strength, and Andrades manifesto advocate for incorporation of knowledge from the colonizers culture whilst simultaneously violating it.
A similar embodied, ritualistic and tactile approach to intellectual endeavors, has been significant to the development of dance practices in the aftermath of the choreographic turn in the early 2000. Chrysa Parkinson’s self interview on practice published in 2009 addressed the relationship between action and ideas in her and others work with dance. Since then, it is common in the dance field that artists appropriate academic concepts in their performative practices without any broader understanding of its original context. The focus is instead on exploring what ideas can do to the perception of oneself, the world or dance, and it lays ground for open association and detours of the imagination. I experience a similar approach to discourse at MIND EATER where I am held in an attention to how language (in the broadest sense) performs on, within and through us. Ideas become food, words become incarnated and the thing that matters is what it generates here today. While Andrade rejected “canned consciousness” 100 years ago, we are today faced with other forms of manufacturing thought. After world war two automation and immaterial goods have replaced tin cans and assembly lines in the west. And with AI text can be copied from anywhere, anytime at an increasing speed. The algorithms of the metaverse consume our time and attention, and the 99% are reduced to users who simultaneously consume and produce content and data for the techno capitalist’s political and military projects. The border between consumption and production is not only ambiguous within arts and culture, but such an ambiguity is a defining feature of our global economy.
A lecture at another festival, Within Practice (4) in Stockholm, teach me about Nancy Fraser’s book Cannibal Capitalism. Scholar Georg Döcker walks around the circle of participants with his laptop showing an image of a snake eating its own tail. He has been describing the shift in how scholars today address the current era as a new development in capitalism. He argues that this shift requires that the performing arts field reconsider the frequently used notions of ‘performance’ and ‘practice’, that the way in which these terms have been employed within the dance field since the choreographic turn no longer holds (5). According to Döcker the image of the snake that eats its own tail is used by Fraser as a metaphor to point at how our current society nurtures itself by eating itself, simultaneously feeding off of and destroying all spheres of life economically, socially, and environmentally. By invoking the figure of the cannibal MIND EATER forces me to think of the monstrous in myself, and how any artistic process is a process of incorporating the outer world in order to expand further into it. As the festival swallows me in its experiments and I embody their perspectives in my thinking I am made aware of how erotic forces make identities, bodies and worlds grow. My collaborator Lisa Schåman has told me that the most important thing in the dramaturgy of a horror movie is to wait as long as possible before revealing the monster, but the monster at MIND EATER is completely abstracted. I left the festival in suspense, with a desire to read and write, and it is through these activities I stumbled upon the trope of the cannibal, its repercussions from the advent of modernity, through the avant garde art movements of the previous century, into today’s hyper capitalism. Still disoriented by the complexities of these ideas, I wonder if MIND EATER’s quest is to emphasise the forces that drive artists in art making, and break apart the conception of the artist as someone who can or should teach its audience morals. If capitalism currently consumes all spheres of life, what would happen if artists took on an equally monstrous and unapologetic approach?
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1) https://2022.oitf.no/article/louis-schou-hansen-in-conversation-with-runa-borch-skolseg/
2) https://blackbox.no/en/seminar-working-title/
3) Silvia Caprioglio Panizza- The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
4) Within Practice is a workshop festival organised annually by Björn Säfsten since 2016. The 2024 edition of the festival took place in Stockholm 30 September-5 October. The lecture with Döcker was held at at Dansens hus/Elverket.
5) Döcker more specifically referred to the impact of Paulo Virno’s figure of the ‘Virtuoso’ (performer) in his interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s writing on ‘Practice’. Döcker argued in general that the Italian Autonomia movement and their marxist analysis of Post Fordism has to be rethought today.
MIND EATER
9th – 11th August
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