HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #2:

notes by Bojana Cvejić

INTRODUCTORY THESES ABOUT THE CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE PERFORMING ARTS SCENES IN PARIS AND BELGRADE

• What, which context? (Context is structured by power relations)
• Whose context? (Who is the subject of the context? In whose name do I speak? What is my relation of belonging to the context? In which grammatical person do I speak? When do I say “I” and when do I say “we”?)
• What is to be done? (from critique to construction)

Context:

• scene (performance), site (inscription), environment (atmosphere)
• scene: magazines, festival and venue networks, conferences, dynamic of trends and fashions
• site: leaving traces, possibility of structural changes, writing history
• environment: general opinion or doxa (Roland Barthes), dominant fiction (Kaja Silverman)
• constraints as limiting factors or as enabling conditions?
• contingency (matter of circumstances, what’s given) and choice of position (the choice of taking a position)
• familiar (native, or learnt, accommodated) and unfamiliar (new, to be explored)

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About: RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS: BELGRADE – PARIS

The departure of HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY are “the Belgrade” of TkH and “the Paris” of Les Labos – two contexts, situations and realities, the power of whose margins and minorities are not evident. As we are unfamiliar with one another’s frames of reference and belonging, the productive way to learn or teach about the context we consider or wish to belong to is to transform it!

The free market economy is the underlying logic that rules all scenes; it entertains the illusion that capital dissolves contexts turning them into a smooth space of operation. This approach insists on what is ignored or considered to be surpassed by the liberal individualism driving freelance artists today: the context. Bounds and rules, distribution of roles and places, as well as where and what you belong to, and what is your matter of concern – are unpopular questions, to put it mildly.

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