Come Together
Thematics “COME TOGETHER” was a residency / gathering concentrating on different approaches of becoming community, with Sara Manente (IT/BE), Delia Popa & Anca Mihulet (RO) and Rana Hamadeh (LB/NL) as guest artists.
“Come together” was initiated from a series of conversations about the creation of an event / gathering between several artists, thinkers and art organisations to discuss art & art practices within the current pressures and struggles of our contemporary world. The process of individuation seems to be constructed out of the power to acquire, out of the desire to become a recognized image. Real life is mediatized to the point that we think we are living it. The enemy is virtual. We are separated. How to disturb these assumptions of the consensus society? How can we re-think, re-practice and re-feel another system? How do we meet? How do we share and experiment?
Out of these thoughts, the act of ‘Come Together’ became a possible act of resistance where we could bring these questions to the front in relation to the art regime. We focused on the encounter and on the hybrid as possible mediums for change. We were interested in art practices that empower and potentialize another life, that give visibility to the ‘not yet’ and sustain it as a source of autonomy and therefore criticality.
Thematics ‘Come Together’ wanted to create an environment to voice the difference as the common we all share, to place the multiple singularities as political potency, to bring bodies in relation to other bodies, to embody the body as power to affect and to be affected, to experiment, to play and to open up the field of ethics by the relation with the ‘other’, to take paradoxes as potentialities, to contaminate each others, to retake the sexual drive of the come together as a political drive. We brought together people from different backgrounds to practice, discuss and share art as a space for the construction and dissemination of knowledge, to question its potential, nature and affect. We wanted to create a space of encounter not predestined by the outcomes but by the directions and orientations that it encounters.
Within this context and in collaboration with a.pass, Rits and Campo we organized several workshops that focused on the Schizophrenic Bodies to test the limits of the economy of our belonging and coming together. Interpreting a Schizophrenic Body as a body that simultaneously belongs to different time and space zones, different fields of experience or history, or a body in a synaesthetic space. We hope that these contexts challenge and open up our ways of working and being around.