SHIFT DATE (2) 25.6 SHIFT TIME (2) 17:00 – 20:00 SHIFT VENUE (2) Zagreb Youth Theater UČILIŠTE – DANCE STUDIO 1

SHIFT DATE (3) 26.6 SHIFT TIME (3) 17:00 – 20:00 SHIFT VENUE (3) Showroom

SHIFT DATE (4) 27.6 SHIFT TIME (4) 17:00 – 20:00 SHIFT VENUE (4) Showroom

SHIFT CURATOR The Sense Lab – Concordia University

SHIFT PARTICIPANTS BIANCA SCLIAR MANCINI, CHRISTOPH BRUNNER, SARA WOOKEY

Today, we understand cities as more then an architectural collection or a geographical limit, but rather as spatial practices (Mumford, de Certeau, Sennet, Lefebvre). As a result, the body in movement and rhythm have become essential elements for our understanding of the contemporary polis. When we talk about a city, we usually understand it as an entity that pre-exists the encounter. The shift (Un)Folding Zagreb will experiment the city as the encounters that it allows to happen and thus collect and present a map of affects between the participants and this shared space.

In a format that resembles a workshop but that aims at a collective research-creation process, we will start from movement and rhythm in order to explore how to know Zagreb through affects. Misperformace here becomes the necessary ground for a different and open concept of performative encounters with our environment.

The starting point for (Un)Folding is the premise that a city can only exist through performance. A city is, therefore, a concept in constant movement. To deal with it means to establish a continuous play of misfirings and misreadings. We propose that one is not performing within a city or even about a city (in which case it would be a scenery for human action) but the city itself is performed through our bodies in movement. The focus on particular and immediate practices that foreground the performing of a city rather performing in a city enable a productive critique of what we regard as performative and what are the materials to perform with.

The city as a state of performance is the shared (and phenomenological) ground for misperforming encounters with each other as well as with existing and imaginary architectures. Bodies on the other hand form, perform, inform and deform what a city is and can shape the environment to confront the ways a city is set to present itself. From our point of view performing a city is always a form of misperforming it, as there is no proper or right state prior to the action.

Our proposal in these terms approaches the various ways through which a city is misperformed and misread. The aim is then to emphasize the processes of collecting and creation along the contradictions of concepts that conform what a city is.

Participants will have a common short reading pack, which includes philosophical texts, as well as other relevant writings and images pre-selected by the curators. The pack also includes historical information about Zagreb, official maps and actual news from the city (including gossip, political and social issues that permeate the public realm). The theory discussions will be embedded within the practices during the workshop/collective creation.

Within (Un)Folding Zagreb we’ll have three molecules of actions, each one lead by one of the curators. Each of the molecules will focus on either movement (led by Sara Wookey), visual (led by Bianca Scliar) or sound elements (led by Christoph Brunner) during the outdoors explorations. Each molecule will have a maximum of four participants, totalizing 15, including the curators. Participants may float among the molecules during the three days.

With a daily topic shared by the group (as specified below), the molecules will start each day together, indoors, and spread outdoors to explore the city, collecting, performing and elaborating tasks proposed by the curators. The molecules will then meet for the last part of the evenings to work with the collected/invented materials on group compositions, which will accumulate each day towards a final version of a Map of Affects.

This method of approaching the city is strongly based on improvisation techniques, both from dance and music, priories flow and process. Our performance is anti-flaneur as it proposes participation and movement of the body as a tool for engagement with the others in the space of the city, exploring the notion of gestural contamination.

(Un)Folding Zagreb will take place during three evenings of the PSi. Each evening will be divided as follows:

Spatializing being

the whole group will do warm-up exercises indoors. This exercises aim to explore direction, speed and the scale of the body and how body forms space-; a “sensibilization” towards the notion of the body as a tool of simultaneously knowing and forming the city.

Becoming Spatialized

this part consists of the outdoor tasks. They are to be accomplished individually and are specific to each of the molecules. This is the moment of engagement with the city and where movement, and rhythm are explored as formation and conformation tools of the public space.

(Un)Folding

the group meets again to put together the impressions and collections (scoops) and to start weaving the map of affects.  We will here juxtapose the findings from each molecule, in order to add, distort and complicate meaning of the singular actions.

In each of the three days we have a specific topics to be investigated by each of the molecules:

Day One: Scales/Bodies/Height

Day Two: Bridges/Borders/Fences

Day Three: Silences/Waits/ (in)Visibility

A sequence of actions will be accumulated from each day, forming, mapping Zagreb in a tri-dimensional and time-based form.

(Un)Folding Zagreb

a research creation collaborative project by Christoph Brunner, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Sara Wookey.

(Un)Folding Zagreb was a series of interventions, developed as a Shift for the PSi15, that aimed at a layer of engagement with the city through the creation of events and micro-actions as modes of thought that would account for the complexity of relations that emerged throughout our presence in the city of Zagreb.

Folding and unfolding were taken as strategies for encounters with complex environments, as processes that ground our performing with the city, a notion based on Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion of folding as a way of becoming with architecture, or the environment. Our investigative process aimed a series of improvisational techniques between bodies and the urban space resulting from an understanding of the City as an Event: an entity that trespasses its architecture, its history and which materializes and dematerializes itself in each of the encounters it allows to emerge.

During three days of intense work, we sought formats to provide an arena for experience; not Situationist playfulness, but rigorous techniques to sustain practices that cause space to emerge and become through the singularity of movements, performing itself with the performers.  Instead of arriving in Zagreb with a pre-rehearsed performance, to be presented to an audience, our goal was to find ways to generate actions from the investigations in loco, between body and site. We wished to avoid an intervention that would have its parameters defined prior to our encounter with that particular city-space. We also wished to avoid arriving with structures that would leave out the chance for the city to fold into the composition of the performances.

The daily routine of the ten participants started with activities in the studio, followed by an exploration at a chosen site, and a conclusion, where we shared the collection of actions we had experienced and what had been found out in the investigation among ourselves. Each day this sharing built an ephemeral and temporal mapping of our presence, according to the conceptual and poetic frame (Day one: scales, bodies, heights. Day two: borders, fences, bridges. Day three: silences, waits, invisibilities. )

While each participant had the freedom to investigate the task with his/her own vocabulary, the connection within the group was always kept. The constant orchestration of the individual responses took place in many forms over the course of the days, such as the creation of a sequence, or parcour, walking together along specified distances … The articulations between the performers never aimed for a precise mode of representation. On the contrary, we kept the focus on working and feeling with and through experience and expression outside any mode of representation. The convergence in the creation of ephemeral sequences and interventions that would belong and be worked on each day, allowed us to provide an openness for relational encounters that became the base for the unfolding process.

Our understanding of the city as the ultimate collaborative realm where the political happens through movements and encounters in their spontaneous, forced, radical or banal qualities. As more than a site, the city can only be defined by those movements, which are always in relation to, or a movement with. In our effort to emphasize the affective tonality of events, we explicitly fostered processes of becoming and tried to enable a kind of sensation of the city that can barely be described, but only be articulated through experience.  These are some of the qualities we hope can be perceived at this documentation video.

http://catalogue.psi15.com/dvd/230-FrakcijaPages.pdf

Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumière, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean –Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.

In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.

From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.

Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?

1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.

Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Performed by authors and performers of the BADco.: Ana Kreitmeyer, Pravdan Devlahović, Zrinka Užbinec, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ivana Ivković, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš

The Process_City trilogy was produced and performed in reverse order (Part 3 to Part 1) from 2004 to 2008. Its segments were shown at many international and Croatian festivals where they have won several awards, among them the Avaz Dragon Award at MESS festival 2008 (Sarajevo, BiH) for the entire trilogy and the Special Jury Prize at BITEF 2007 (Belgrade, Serbia) for the second part of trilogy, Ex-position.

Concept and Direction: Boris Bakal
Dramaturgy: Katarina Pejović, Boris Bakal, Stanko Juzbašić

Directed by: Paolo Magelli