Call for Participation: ACTS OF LIVING
Call for Participation: ACTS OF LIVING (16. — 23.09.)
The artists Tis Aly and Suzanne Stavast are part of the Artist-in-Garden Residency in HELLERAU and will come to Dresden in September to work on their project “ACTS OF LIVING” in the Kulturgarten behind the Festspielhaus.They are looking for participants who want to connect, learn from each other and create alliances for sustainable living during the residency from September 4 to 24. The project started as a research performance to search and understand ways to increase awareness for the current climate crisis and environmental issues, in which everyone shares a responsibility. Looking into new perspectives of living together and fostering communal fictions.
As an Act of Living, the artists want to interact with locals and use the Kulturgarten as a space of gathering, a place for creativity, discussion and exchange. The project invites participants to weekly performances, a one-day workshop and a collective performance at the end of the residency. Movement, voice, feelings and all possible and impossible ways will be used to get moving together.
Stavast and Aly take the space of art as a place to resist, rest, and exchange with visitors, and present practices and procedures of care. Looking at ecofeminism, decolonization and social justice, recipes for staying rebellious and healthy – queerness and how people define it and what matters to them. This process is an invitation to discover old and new ways of living together, to find reconciliation, and to reunite forces for sustaining life on Earth – and beyond.
Dates
16.09., 11:00 h till 17:00 h – Treffen / 18:00 h – Performance
23.09., 15:00 h – Acts of living: come as you are
If you have any questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact the artists by emailing bioactsofliving@gmail.com – and propose your own ideas and enlarge perspectives.
What do the artists imagine that they can bring to the Market of Exchange?
They navigate between the following topics:
#care for the living beings
#care for the soul and elements of nature
#care for the community and the self
They welcome you to bring your own ideas and associate them to one of those three topics!
The market is an invitation to exchange knowledge that strives for life and living beings in its various forms, embracing what our environment is lacking more and more: diversity.
Giving space to enhance the processes of creating, retaining and spreading knowledge, taking each act as an individual and collective impact into the realm.
As an act of care – they host and invite individuals as well as groups to share, opening a venue for exchange of practices of care and procedures for the preservation of life on Earth. These can be done through an open conversation, mediation, the exchange of recipes, and/ or plants, body therapy and collective learning, as such, dance, massage and sound healing, etc.
Act of resistance – because they invest in systems of healing and care that do not follow the ongoing logics of marketing and normative forms, accomplishing the soul as an essential part of their process of existing in the world and self-healing. Resistance is a force in itself – it’s a movement contrary to the forces that try to turn it down – though this acts against the normative forces – the supremacist thinking and other forms of oppression. Grieving together is a way to dismantle the never ending happiness of neoliberal logic.
Act of solidarity – giving, exchanging, retributing, resonating in each other’s lives, offering, spreading and enhancing a world with more social justice, an act of liberation carried out by all participants. It’s also an opportunity to install and give space for other forms of existing, persisting and resisting in the late-capitalism era. Concrete actions will be done in the market, some others will be proposed and depend upon the willingness and openness of the audience to participate in these actions.
The artists understand solidarity broadly – from food offering to listening to other people’s struggles, to connecting activists and people who need their help, enhancing when possible the accessibility of a venue, etc.
What/ where do they want to go?! What do the artists want to achieve?
● A community that cares for itself, for one another and for the environment – not forgetting that humans are only a part of it.
● A process which enables this exchange within the art frame, calling for an integrative process
● Strengthen the immune system by accessing better food options / health care practices and taking this wisdom as a form of resistance
● Care as a form of rebellion, in these times where it is needed the most.
Suzanne Stavast, a Queer gender non conforming person born in the Netherlands, based in Berlin. They are seeking change and healing through performance and believe in the transformative quality it could bring. They work with ritualization, clowning, movement, voice, drag/queering, and they like to create costumes from recycled and organic materials.
Tis Aly – BIPOC/QUEER – born in Brazil, based in Berlin – Aly has been searching ways to turn creative paths into political choices – seeking for a healing process throughout social justice, and a process of loving , giving and performance as a narrative of the present towards the (desirable ) future. Aly’s artistic practice comes from decolonization, body movement, investigation and other forms of making, recycling and looking toward paths of reviewing, rewriting, renewing.