DiaSpores
here some thoughts, maybe a modus operandi, maybe a backdrop on our exercice commun....
The tarot did not originate from a single, concluded source but it is diasporic, risen from the many travels, many tales, many cosmologies of different people. It’s one story that digested many.The tarot is also described as journey, the fool’s journey, who travels through three different degrees of consciousness; it thinks in cycles and unlinearly, though the cards are contained frames and the spreads are designs (a cross, a circle, a linear sequence, to be read). They vary and shift meaning, and so does the reader, multiplying to the point at which there is no single object/reference point.
I see the “commoning” of works a way to create a soil of references and experiences, looking at the single research/works in all their elements, in all their cosmologies (own sources/inspirations/motives/techniques/ gossips), a meeting of cultures, that hybridize or just live alongside each other.
Improvisation has been and still is a revolutionary place where to access personal and collective archetypes, behaviors, nightmares and dreams. To know enough to not know. I find dance and improvisation practices, to be technique of both ecstasy and repair. If dancing is not political per se, it can prepare for the political. A strong inspiration for me in the last years has bee the articulation offered by the hackers+activist+natives of the Technoshamanism network from Brazil, with whom I hosted a workshop on the anti_hijacking of dreams. Here some of their words:
It’s our job to drastically oppose projects of decreasing sleep and, instead, see dreams as a public space of onto-political production, exploited by control systems. Activating the network of the unconscious and the dream community is a potent form of resistance in our point of view, that allows us to understand disputed relations for the domination of the unconscious and equips us for this dispute. In this struggle we need to find command lines that activate our collective capacity for producing worlds.
FALLING SKY
When we started doing the dream lab it had at least two strong influences, one was to dream again as David Kopenawa recommended in his book Falling Sky, after making it very clear that whites can't dream, because they only dream about themselves and their goods. The second was the feeling of daily kidnapping of our subjectivity through the internet, apps, social networks, etc. The reality was accelerating at the same rhythm as we were losing our sleep, dreams and memory. As we were proposing our dream immersions other influences were appearing, such as recognizing the territoriality of dreams, dreams seen here as a disputed ontopolytic territory, demarcation now! We want to dream again. By overcoming the surface of daily dreams by some training, we can achieve more potent dimensions for these trips. The trainings are like programs of reforestation of the unconscious, or fertilization of intraspecific communication....
CARNIVAL OF DREAMS OR DREAM PARTY
(Lafitau about Iroquois) We were recently faced with the "dream party", which was very close to what we were already doing, but we did not imagine that we accidentally referred to an ancestral indigenous practice compared to carnival, only based on dreams. The dream party was described by the Jesuit anthropologist Father Lafitau about the Iroquois people of Canada who say that this dream party or the Onnonbouarori (madness or dislocation of the brain) is the carnival of the Iroquois. He described these feasts in the 17th century saying that it was repeated every year lasting about three to four weeks, it was the time when the Iroquois cross over into the characters of their dreams, fantasize, announce the content of their dreams to everyone, behave like clowns, as if were out of their minds. It is as if the whole village is plunged into a kind of irrationality....
I fantasize about repurposing the individual researches/practices using them as cards, that we shuffle and lay out, over and over again, developing an improvisation practice over the three weeks, becoming a tribe of sort, entering into communication at different levels of consciousness, a psychic rave, becoming oracles.
These last 3 years I dedicated time to a collective project called lecken (see lecken.berlin), a rave, femme forward sex party with a strong commitment to the dance floor. I became interested at looking at dance and somatics as portals to be able to reclaim lost techniques of ecstasy, belonging to the western mind legacy, I asked myself, what that is? what did it do to joyfulness? What does it do to the living?
Some tracking of it and further themes, you find in the zine attached, created for Tanzregreß a rave we organized in Dresden for Tanzkongress 2019.
These are somehow premises or a landscape of personal current interests that could surround exercice commun. Spending time collectivizing the art work/dream, improvising, “tripping”, becoming visionaries, abandoning, finding, abandoning, re-writing, via improvisations, journeys, constructions. Using the individual works as cosmology to be unfolded, confessed, transmitted, transmuted, abandoned, some sort of co-existence through composting, a practice of non attachment.
The fact the each one of you has a particular work and interests, or practices, and shared memories, is a super rich soil/psychic space, first to just look at what is there. Listening to each other story of obsessions and sources. Taking time with that. Then we can figure out together a way to open up the different materials, how to common them, encountering the problems that might arise from that, to then maybe finding several narrative frames that can contain them (a carnival? a dreaminadreaminadream? a simulated reality game? a (political) party? a mourning parade?...).
I would very much like to offer ourselves an experience of intimacy, loss and beauty, calling each others as witnesses, and the public as dreamers of our dreams, or fellow citiziens of the spectral realm. Asking again and again, what can we do together that we cannot do alone?
