Tool cycle: New visualisations for activated bodies is a seasonal performance program taking place through 2021 at Foco Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal and Goyki 3 Art incubator in Sopot, Poland with invited artists from Portugal, Poland, United States, Switzerland, Russia, and Slovenia.

Our ideal approach to a curatorial methodology is to invite a rite of passage as a main line of narration for working with invited artists, meaning thinking in terms of transformation as opposed to regulation. Interpretation makes it possible to be free of the first association. By shifting definitions we refuse to follow pre-existing determinations. Through engaging bodies to join in this set of experiences we acknowledge the possibility of learning. Thus, we consider performance a multi-modal tool for generating forms of knowledge, equipping artists, participants, and beholders, with certain instruments they can implement fiercely in varied contexts.

Tool cycle: New visualisations for activated bodies investigates the evolving themes of: boundary, elasticity, ritual, and chaos. Within a paradigm of over-potentiated bodies, what does it mean to visualise certain aspects of a performance or a body?

Boundary is not boldly demarcating, it is constantly dissolving and being written. Filters are also boundaries, but interesting in that they allow for the passage of accumulated materials, information, and beings while separating one space from another. Boundary, bounded, bond, bind: a flexible progression of powers which can be organised on a micro-scale. Without communication one doesn’t understand limits, and our own filters determine what we value, which changes. Elasticity can be metaphysical and spatial, within a logic of adaptability. Context defines form. The middle point exists because of being stretched to its polarities. The processes of expansion and contraction within growth define context. What is elasticity without a subject? What is a subject without a symbol? Ritual being both focused intention and periodic unconscious repetitive action has the advantage of being never fully sacred nor ordinary, and therefore, dwells in a domain characterised by its own materiality. It is easy to be occult, and we want to avoid that. Liberating a definition of ritual from rules, protocols, and ideologies; we free ritual from defining itself. As opposed to attempting to order the broader explosive chaos of the universe or human experience we would like to focus on the micro-cosmic of the artist’s particularity. Without the poetic, and the approach of the artist there is no access to structure. Therefore, there is a need for a guide, a translator, confident in their poetic universe who initiates our explorations.

Josseline Black / Kasia Sobczak

PROGRAM

5-9 April 2021
On the One Hand / On the Other
by Carlos Manuel Oliveira
with: Daniel Pizamiglio, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Ana Trincão, Bruno Brandolino, Adriano Vicente, Tiago Gandra

3-4 September 2021
Patronki: deep shadows fall lazily, enveloping everything around me by Martyna Borowiecka

30-31 October 2021
Touching ‘Through space’
by Rafał Pierzyński

17,18 & 19 December 2021
Faf and Tsalar Honoring
by Institute for Mastering Time (IMT)
with Arseny Zhilyaev, Asya Volodina, Nika Ham and Nikolai Kharabinovich