HISTORY / BACKGROUND:

Unfixing the Atlas is the co-creation (2024) stemming from the project/process Post/Pandemics (2022/2023).

This work builds and redraws a small world order -- consisting of traces -- within the spatial and temporal boundaries of a performance-space. 

This production is an extension of a long working process, in which the current team of creators got to know each other little by little. This performance grew from the proces Post/Pandemics which unfolded itself in different places / cities throughout almost two years. Post/Pandemics started with the Summer Refuge (August 2022 at De Markten, Brussels), and surfaced each new season with a new 'refuge' in various locations: Open places where people could meet casually, for which Heike Langsdorf and Simone Basani provided in-situ conditions for proposing practices to one another, or to simply spend time.

No selection process was used to attract people -- neither calls for participation, nor a strategy to be ensure certain forms of diversity or exclusivity. Instead Post/Pandemics invited people into a process of "self-determined" discovery...

Those pressures falling away, we might find ways to experience, reflect, think together. 

Throughout the "refuges", a group of core participants, returning to the mentioned open places, and -- throuout time -- a group of artists, proposing things to do, found itself. 

During the fourth "refuge" in Kortrijk (May 2023), these participants chose to together go for a co-creation:

Unfixing the Atlas (UtA) could also be described as a kaleidoscopic conversation space, in which we look at the world as an atlas of traces. Traces we are born into, traces we leave ourselves, traces we must or want to relate to, and traces that guide our lives. The conversation through all this material requires unbiased listening to each other, to the things that surround us, to and through the memories we live by and sit with...

An experience similar to an activated exhibition, UtA is an arrangement being constantly reread and shifted by the creators/performers and everyone present, including visitors. To avoid one particular reading and orientation emerging from the setup, the whole "performance" revolves around disconnecting the links and logics that keep emerging.

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Participation within the socio-artistic often still remains a precarious matter as "participatory" work risks to lose itself in pronounced hierarchical distinctions between who "can" and who "cannot" make sweeping decisions. 

Often that divide runs between the initiating organizations and artists on one side, and the 'non-professional' participants on the other. There is a lively discourse in our woke times about the blind spots in institutional policies of access and participation, but often the scope of this discussion is limited to the ethics of invitation (going to be participants), but not extended in terms of organization, the choreography of time, space and the distribution of fees and materials, or also the administration and follow-up in between or afterwards. As a result, the participatory nature of many projects often remains one-sided and lacks a component of self-criticism (on the initiators' side). 

The ethical dimension often suffers from pacification, not really daring to take the consequences of its own assumptions.

radical_hope has tried once and again in the past to set up artistic projects in which the initiators and participants would merge with each other, producing so-called 'makeshift communities' (Jeroen Peeters, 2015, Makeshift communities of practice, Notes on Sitting with the Body 24/7 by Langsdorf and radical_hope). These projects succeeded in creating a temporary community from an artistic vision. The aesthetic and ethical component was important, but the process often did not allow for taking the time for figuring out how all people involved could take

decisions in regard to what was happening in the process.

Post/Pandemics and now the co-creation UtA therefore happens "in memoriam" of Mount Tackle (2016/17 & 19). Mount Tackle asked pointed questions about what an object might mean in the context of a specific space, background, interpretive framework, and position. The resulting anti-aesthetics certainly had a critical component, to some extent also undermined the aesthetic preferences of the authors, and did also partially relinquish control over the direction of the audience. Nevertheless was the process still not "radically" participatory (both during the creation process and the performance itself) in regard to how the work eventually was formed.

UtA becomes (thanks to the long pre-trajectory and process of Post/Pandemics, a piece whereby the initiating artists, the supporting practitioners, and the so-called participants collectively create a space for interaction, in which they themselves develop their divers senses of performance -- their divers control mechanisms and aesthetics. 

This means that everybody of the group is invited and gets the chance to go beyond their idea of "what looks good," and invest in weaving and letting integrate their threads of material/ities into a multiverse.

UtA can be seen as an attempt to embrace what is not part of one's familiar vocabulary -- of what one doesn't expect to make or see. In this sense, UtA wants to contribute to a world where we learn how to "recycle" old and no longer functioning positions of power into something that works anew -- both energetically, socially, politically and also artistically/aesthetically: makers, instead of proactively staging material (things/people/stories) would learn to create conditions for things, bodies, ideas and "speech" to appear.

With UtA, radical_hope is committed to the question of how we can transform the so-called "ennobling" ambition of art into an artistic ambition to take into account society, the other, that which has not yet found a place in "culture". To consider society not something that needs to be 'elevated' by art, but that is simply what it is. ^(*)

UtA wants to challenge and counter the idea of social harmony: how can a world be prosperous inspite of nothing ever being sure / insured of its place. For radical_hope, such a world starts with questioning the place and position of artists, being initiators, organizers and human beings: there where things happen on a daily basis, in the places we work together.