This workshop/space is part of my [empirical] ongoing practice-based research as a performer and pedagogue, which proposes a creative, political and ontological cooperation of bodies and singularities by means of a collective creation of Solo-performances; that is to say, a group of living beings that collectively investigate, reflect, discuss and examine within singular works, ideas, desires, frustrations, approaches, etc., moving constantly from the collective to the singularities and vice versa.
In this regard, the collective Solo-performance manifests itself as an opportunity to produce an encounter, an ephemeral community that generate common affections, common actions capable of prospering by accumulation towards what we do not know yet, and of resistance to what degrades, saddens, blocks and kills… beyond the product in itself.
This practice-based research deals with two fundamental topics: 1) the opposition between the concept of immanence and transcendent and 2) the body and its capacity to be affected and affect (mind-body-things). Taking as a source of inspiration the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza by focusing on his Ethics.
1) From a transcendent perspective, the world is conceived as a creation, so that it is nothing without its creator. From an immanentism perspective, the world is itself a producer (rather than a creator) of itself, or a cause of itself, and we understand it better through philosophy or physics than through theology.
How to understand the opposition: transcendent creator and a world produced immanently by itself in the context of performing Arts and its market?
How the mechanism of the transcendental god imposed by colonial modernity is still present in our creative practice? Like the market, the idea of the authentic artist, the funding systems, the need of an art institution as an art legtimizer, the art institution as a legitimazer, etc.
Is it possible to generate an immanent practice/space that is caused by itself? A collective process that expresses the conatus: a power or inclination of a thing to continue existing, enhancing and preserving itself…
(…) A force that seeks both survival and well-being and not a mere effect of the body, subjected to one of the worst violence’s of capitalism, forcing the individual to self-promotion and success (even if we still need to pay the bills)?