School of Reparar Ed#4-2023

new concept-tools of the inhabited philosophy of Modus Operandi AND

Alight & Flight: Support, Enchantment and Restoration

We always (re)start from the Nest, just as we also (re)start each time we leave the nest and become Flock.

The School of Reparar 2023 invites to a practical and experiential pathway of reencounter with the incarnate experiences of the Nest and the Flock, concretizations that emanate from the gestures-rituals of Alight and Flight, theme-issue of this year's edition.

Continuing the research of Support and Enchantment as ways to rescue the sensitive experience of inseparability, Alight and Flight will unfold in a durational journey, marked by different workshops, laboratories and courses-retreats that will take place throughout the year, creating a safe field for us to research and experiment, intimately and collectively, ways to operate Restoration.

Persisting in the investigation of how to Repair the Irreparable, which sustains the Modus Operandi AND, we propose a delay in Restoration as one of the many modulations of Reparar (Portuguese word that synthesizes a triple gesture: stopping again, attentive noticing and care-curating). Restoration is summoned here both as deep rest and restoration of forces, in the struggle to discontinue the systemic Irreparable, and as re-historicization of life forms, allowing us to re-formulate, and thus re-orient, our ways of existing, relating, and inhabiting, in the direction of respecting and honoring Life.

We believe that tuning in to inseparability at the level of body-soma is essential to support a consistent political positioning of deprogramming, at the intimate level of the individual-self (and, by reverberation, at the collective level where we are many), the logics of Debt and Doubt that, consecutively, have been corrupting our relationship with the Gift and reiterating the usurpatory logics of the hegemonic and structural Irreparable. helplessness and disenchantment, in the form of weariness and confusion on the one hand, and sadness and indifference on the other, configure the symptomatic of the capitalistic expropriation of the sensible, and produce the illusion of separation characteristic of contemporary subjectivities, reiterating the perpetuation of the Irreparable plunder. Demobilizing the Irreparable, thus, involves re-membering - calling back to memory that we are inseparable, and also putting back together what has been separated, repairing the access to a wisdom of the (i)limit, far vaster than each of us: the embodied, implicated, and timeless wisdom of the Sum-Earth aggregate that connects us to the Common Fund of Life.

To face this mission, which re-enacts the key question of the Modus Operandi AND - how to kill the system (in us) without dying? - we need to be restored. We need to have our forces rebuilt, and our forms softened, porous, reopened - deformed…

So, instead of answering, we re-ask:

In the face of the Irreparable, manifested in the illusion of separation and the consequent affection of exhaustion/disempowerment and blunting/disenchantment,

How to Nest & Flock?

We call for a state of Alight, in which we can re-orient helplessness into Support. A state of rest and re-encounter with the body-soma of the Earth, in which it is possible to arrive again, to land, and to make way for an urgent regeneration. Making Nest so that we allow ourselves to be (re)made by it, reconnecting with the sustenance, the involvement, the shelter, and the refuge of Support, in which it becomes possible to relearn how to receive.

The nest, where we ground in Support, is where we pre-stop [pré-parar] (in a pause-waiting for birth, or rebirth), where we prepare [preparar] (in gestating, this gesture of building what will come) and, sometimes, also where we repair [reparar] (offering a safe field for the remaking of life through letting die what needs to die).

So the nest is also the place of the first manifestation of Enchantment: the glow of life-death breaking through. A portal, in the here-and-now, to the beauty and justness of all that is.

We call for a state of Flight, in which we can re-orient disenchantment into Enchantment. A state of radical dis-illusionment, in which, because we detach from the mechanisms of identification and understanding, we bewitch the curse from the individual point of view that, undone, also allows us to take off: to enter the flight, to return to the Flock. In the infra- and trans-individual solidarity of the flock, we re-link access to the Enchantment, a passage to the implied order of Mystery, to the (extra)ordinary fountain of the possibilities of Life, in constant re-generation and re-union, in which it becomes possible to relearn how to reciprocate.

The Flock - which is also the stampede of systemic loneliness - is when and where we experience the fusion without confusion, the integrity without wholeness of existing in co-sensing with the All-Everything, at the same time below and beyond the One. It is when and where we embody the recognition of inter-being (and infra-being, and trans-being), and experience (dis)integration in belonging to the vastness of the Common Fund of Life. To flock is to do nothing but to be of service: in tune with the most immediate surroundings, neither faster nor slower, neither too close nor too far away, neither too equal nor too different, neither lacking nor in excess, just in a state that is because it is common.

Fernanda Eugenio | Lisbon, March 2023

About the School

The School of Reparar is an annual ongoing program of expanded research-creation and artistic-political training, which houses four meeting interfaces and takes place on the Portugal-Brazil axis.

Based on Fernanda Eugenio's creation always in process with Modus Operandi AND, in collaboration with the multi-localized network of artists from AND Collective and with different artists invited each time, the School of Reparar takes a question-theme per year, from the practical-theoretical constellation of MO_AND, as a motto for the creation of new performative devices of encounter, experiential propositions, games and tools of collective composition-creation, adopting the durational structure of the journey to invite to dwelling and persistence in the intimate-political work of trans-form-action.

Its four lines of activities are designed to provide participants with a gradual and supported journey of navigation in the issue-theme of the year.

We always start with hANDling, workshops for sharing the MO_AND and related practices (March to June; September to November, in Lisbon and different cities in Brazil each year), dedicated to offering the foundations for sustaining the annual journey, through the introduction and unfolding of the concept-tools and central principles of the MO_AND, combined with body practices of the AND Collective.

Next, we enter the Unruly Studies, a group of practiced and experimental studies (May - Portugal and October - Brazil), dedicated to sharing the inhabited philosophy around the concepts in focus each year.

Then we come to LANDscape, an immersive retreat-course (July - Portugal and January - Brazil), built as a trans-formation-action ritual-journey, in which the Modus Operandi AND multiplies itself in a set of more complex incarnated political-affective propositions, that summon different modulations of the AND constellation game side by side with ritual-pieces specially created, each time, to provide the sensitive and alive experience of the issue-theme. This activity is, at the same time, end and beginning: a culmination of each year's journey, every July, which, when repeated in January, also operates the prepreparation for the following year, and for a new issue-theme about to emerge.

The whole journey is assisted and nurtured by [under]stANDing, a program of continued research and artifact creation by Fernanda Eugenio in collaboration with the AND Collective. stANDing program is the school being gestated as it happens and runs throughout the year in two seasons (February-July and September-January), composed of face-to-face work in the Atelier AND Lab in Lisbon, online meetings and the LAND Creation Residencies, opening up to the outside world through sharing sessions and informal process shows a few times a year.

It is also worth mentioning that, although hANDling, Unruly Studies and LANDscape are constituted as interlinked activities, they are articulated in a way that also allows the entrance of new participants at any moment of the trip, who may access the experience in a sporadic and occasional way.

The School of Reparar proposes to inhabit the 'in-between' as an interval of strength, establishing itself in the heart of the art-life intersections and structuring itself in a spread out and multi localized way, in the transit between Portugal and Brazil, between the urban and the rural and between the present and the virtual, in a commitment to combine a consistent subjective and sensitive displacement with geographical decentering and digital propagation. It claims itself, thus, as a field of support for enchantment, as a safe field for risk: firmed on care and focused on (re)activating the attentive relationship with the Earth-Soma and, at the same time, on infiltrating and sustaining a communitarian mode in the urban and digital everyday life.

The School of Reparar annually offers a minimum of 25% of places in the form of full scholarships with an intersectional profile, for people made vulnerable by intercessions of class, race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, dissident corporealities, migration and/or ethnic origin.

The activities of the School of Reparar in Portugal are bilingual (Portuguese and English) whenever necessary.

The activities of the School of Reparar in Portugal are translated into Portuguese Sign Language whenever necessary.

The facilities of the Atelier AND Lab in Lisbon are accessible for people in wheelchairs or with crutches.