Saturday December 8, 5pm - 11pm

PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC: Open Studio

TkH [Walking Theory] will end their three-year long project How to Do Things by Theory with Open Studio: an occasion to present, share and discuss outcomes of various lines of investigation that this editorial collective from Belgrade pursued in Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers from 2010 to 2012. Open Studio will show materials from Re-Hallucinating Contexts Paris-Belgrade (2010-2011), which confronted two independent art and cultural scenes; illegal_cinema, the practice of uncurated self-organized screenings of films in alternative production and knowledge exchange,   which is still going on in Les Laboratoires; Exhausting Immaterial Labor in Performance, the joint issue of the journal TkH and Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers produced in public editing sessions. Finally, a special focus of this Open Studio is on the research project Performance and the Public that Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda carried out in 2011 and 2012. During Open Studio, TkH will launch the book Public Sphere by Performance written by Vujanović and Cvejić, and present the study for Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, a film made by Marta Popivoda. TkH will also offer video materials from the workshop "Performative Technologies of the Group" that Cvejić conceived in collaboration with Popivoda, and Christine De Smedt and Siegmar Zacharias, with the participation of students from Paris VIII Dance studies and others.



The point of departure for this research is the recurrent problem of the public: the eclipse of the public sphere throughout the twentieth century as a marker of the crisis of representative democracy. The theoretical and political perspectives of this transdisciplinary research stem from the discontinuous experiences of participation in the public sphere in former socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberalism.TkH proposes an analysis of and discussion about the public––and its discontents––through several models of mass, collective and self-performances, such as social drama and social choreography. In numerous collaborations with artists, theoreticians, and activists in 2011, TkH have closely observed transversal social, artistic, and cultural artifacts and practices: movements, images, laws, habits, and discourses. The core motivation for the research that ranges from performance studies to political theory and social science can be illustrated by the following questions from the book’s preface:  
"…What has the role of the public been in all these historical and current moments? Even if the public has not been passive and invisible in all of them, what has its position and its power been? Did it effectuate changes? Moreover, even if it has had political and social effects, we are inclined to repeat John Dewey’s question: was this public aware of the consequences of its actions? …What did we ask for when we as a public arose in protest? And how does this correspond to what we got in return, supporting or opposing the one or the other political actor on the public scene? …What can we as citizens do with what we know and have “in our hands,” or in our case, with theoretical and practical expertise in the field of performance?"


Program

5-7pm
Display of materials from How to Do Things by Theory with informal talks with Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda
7-8.30pm
Talk about the research Performance and the Public and launch of the book Public Sphere by Performance by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić
8.30-9.15pm
Dinner
9.15-10.15pm
Screening of the study for the film Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body and aftertalk with Marta Popivoda
from 10.15pm
Drinks