'MO_AND in Conversation With' Practices

Practices originating from the external collaborations line "MO_AND in Conversation With...", which may eventually integrate the Calendar or annual editions of the School of Reparar.

MO_AND & SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE

Fernanda Eugenio & Gustavo Ciríaco

City Labs

Cities are as diverse as the layers that constitute them. They never cease to re-emerge, to re-perform before our gaze and to engage us with their imperious and inevitable atmospheres, accidental and shipwrecked, fragile and strong, banal and extraordinary. Alchemies always in process, producing conflicting, albeit osmotic, patterns of dwelling, empirical/sensorial experience, and social (dis)integration. Moreover, resulting from many architectural dreams, from the spurious mixture between utopian fantasies, improvised solutions, power structures and contingent local deviations, cities are both concrete forms and ephemeral territories. In them we live and die, we meet and we part, maintaining the daily fiction that bonds the interstices of the broader panorama of urban phenomena.

City Labs are temporary laboratories for attention, mapping, creation and on-site performance, installed in neighbourhoods and critical peripheries of different cities, chosen for the pertinent link to local political and affective issues. With this itinerant structure, Fernanda Eugenio and Gustavo Ciríaco have travelled, since 2009, through the most diverse urban environments, in South America, the USA, Europe and Asia, collecting a multitude of couplings and arrangements situated amidst urban operations, and researching the performative variability of the city-form.

In this durational collaboration, Fernanda Eugenio's protocols of Ethnography as Situated Performance enter into conversation with the contextual creation procedures that Gustavo Ciríaco employs in the construction of his immersive and relational performances, generating propositions sometimes transferable to other sites, sometimes unrepeatable. These propositions are, in turn, shared in the Site-Specific Practices workshop.

Site-Specific Practices

These workshops, guided by Fernanda Eugenio in collaboration with the  contextual artist Gustavo Ciríaco, were created from the experience of the City Labs collaborative project, active since 2009, setting up  temporary laboratories of artistic research in public spaces of  countries as diverse as Vietnam, the USA or Brazil. Some editions of the  workshop also include the transmission and/or re-enactment of excerpts  from contextual performances by Gustavo Ciríaco and performance-games of  the Re-Programme Series by Fernanda Eugenio.

The focus of the  workshop is to practice a set of perceptual propositions to experiment  (with) the place and to investigate the performativity of cities. Combining  the procedures of Ethnography as Situated Performance with approaches  from contextual art, the first part of the work involves an exploratory  journey through the geographic and social vicinities of the place that  hosts the workshop, an exercise of recognition of the materialities and  operations that compose the urban experience and of attention to the  minute and the rarefied that give access to the poetic dimension of  everyday life.

Using the collected sensitive matter, the  participants are then invited to create short in situ performances, individually or in small groups, focusing on the borderline of what is  already happening there and the more or less ephemeral contact with an ‘enlarged possible’, playing with the fantasy of what places can be.

Site-Specific Practices are generally offered in one-week workshops and take  place in Spring or Summer time in Lisbon, the most appropriate time of  the year for spending long periods outdoors. The workshops are also held  (inter)nationally, in the context of festivals and artistic residencies  comissioned by artistic and cultural structures.

MO_AND & AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT (AM)

Fernanda Eugenio & Soraya Jorge

In this collaborative research project, we focus on the political potential and the urgency of establishing a field of exchange, cohabitation and the creation of cross-procedures between ethical-aesthetic practices and somatic practices.

Practices of Reparagem/Reparation (MO_AND) & Witnessing

From the approximation and conversation between the practice of reparagem/reparation (MO_AND) and the practice of witnessing (AM), we join forces towards the constitution of a set of tactics of self-care and care for the environment. We try that the two practices simultaneously complement each other and function as each other’s 'antibody'. Although formally very distinct, the correspondence between practices is explicit. Both share the same question-affect: the commitment to the refinement of sensitive listening and the constitution of a (micro)political sensibility, through an experiential, relational and situated research.

Authentic Movement(AM) is a somatic relational practice for the development of incarnated/embodied consciousness, called somafulness by Soraya Jorge, responsible for the introduction of this work in Brazil and Portugal, and for a specific approach to this practice and its sharing that amounts to more than twenty years of existence. The basis of the research proposed by the AM is the positional structure mover-witness: it is from the establishment of a relationship of trust and reciprocity between the positions of seeing and being seen that a secure field of forces is created for the contemplation of the body and its states and for the practice of a direct listening of sensations. The (re)connection to the plane of sensation functions as a key to map, move and heal recurrent patterns, reactive tendencies and emotional wounds, from the gradual development of an internal witness: a moving consciousness, able to follow without judging, communicating without accusing and be accountable for the narratives and interpretations that it creates.

The expanded political potential of the combination of AM and MO_AND tools is noteworthy. The combination of tools is shared in different modalities of the collaborative workshops Practices of Reparagem and Witnessing, oriented by Fernanda Eugenio and Soraya Jorge, together and/or in articulation with partners, and also members of this research, Guto Macedo and Naiá Delion. On the one hand, MO_AND contributes to the expansion of the embodied consciousness proposed by AM, in a commitment not only to self-knowledge but also to the engagement and participation in a collective plane. On the other hand, AM calls for the extension, to the plane of ‘individual happening’, of the exercises of fractalizing perception, harbouring accidents and sufficient positioning, proposed by MO_AND.

Employing different resources, both Modus Operandi AND and Authentic Movement investigate, from a field and bodily practice, the modulations between presence and absence, inside and outside, perception and apprehension, affect and partition, focus and distraction, instant and memory, singularity and collectivity, desire and responsibility.

MO_AND + AM workshops begin with one or two days dedicated to the introduction to each of the practices separately. In the following days, some propositions explore ways of combining AM tools - the mover,  the witness and field of somafulness in-between - with those of the MO_AND – the ethics of incorporation of accidents, the defragmentation of oneself and the practice of reparagem using the (counter)dispositif of the WHAT-HOW-WHEN-WHERE game.

With variable durations and formats, the workshops adopt different designations, depending on the specific modulation to explore or move at each time.

'Repair and Witness Practices: Modus Operandi AND and Authentic Movement

MO_AND + DANCE & COREOGRAPHY

Fernanda Eugenio & Sílvia Pinto Coelho

Among  the many and varied practices we have to place ourselves in a state of  active listening, research and creation, this workshop tries to activate  as hypothesis the possibility of sensorial isolation, delimiting a  temporary zone of attention. The curiosity of perception and the  creation of nexuses in an incipient state constitute the focus of the  research

To inhabit an already-constituted field involves a  process of delicate and re-situated adjustment and engagement in each  step of the way. Something like oiling and tuning the machine while we  use it: a labour of careful tuning. Sometimes, this process already  inhabits us. In this case, the work to be done may be to recognize what  is already in progress and to explore, attentively, the generated images  and imagination.

Practices of Attention

is the name given by  Sílvia Pinto Coelho to a set of propositions that she has been developing from methods of looking at everyday choreography. Within the  scope of AND Lab, these practices of attention are aligneg with the  practices of attention proposed by Modus Operandi AND, combining  different exercises for the inventory of what-is-already-there, in that  diffuse zone that we call 'before', looking if and into how we (continue  to) begin and researching preparation tactics.

Both Fernanda  Eugénio and Sílvia Pinto Coelho investigate different ways of looking at  these processes as a decantation dramaturgy: everything 'can' (happen),  but between what 'can' (happen) and what actually becomes possible,  what is revealed and relevant, both individually and collectively? These  workshops usually take place in the context of AND Summer Schools, as  preparatory work at the beginning of each day. They are also sometimes  offered autonomously.

MO_AND + RADICAL TENDERNESS

Fernanda Eugenio & Dani D'Emilia

The Practices of Dis-Immunisation

come out of the encounter between the politics of co(m)passionment, part of Fernanda Eugenio’s MO-AND ethics, and Radical Tenderness, Dani d'Emilia’s practice in the scope of performance and radical pedagogy. They investigate, within the plane of corporeality, possible paths for the activation of non-hierarchical and disseminated modulations of love and loving, released from pre-defined conformations. Expanding love’s operability also as a 'strangership force', these practices call for an attunement to the improper and unfamiliar, moving beyond the logic of dis/identification and mis/understanding as (the only) basis for engaged relationality.

(Re)claiming affective territories immunised by the mechanisms of indifference and/or identitary foreclosure within capitalist and colonial frames, these practices propose themselves as tools for deep listening, engagement and presencing of one another whilst committing to reciprocal care in the process, creating and holding each body with the courage and frankness involved in a continuous (re)imagining and (re)doing of ourselves, in/through each relation.

This collaboration is anchored in the desire to experiment with embodied relational procedures and political-affective practices for social trans-formation, exploring the fold between the intimate and the political. Creating the conditions for exercising this political practice involves accepting the risk and responsibility of circumscribing zones of temporary intimacy with the unknown and the unknowable, experiencing states of deliberate vulnerability as we explore the variable elasticity of permeability in each encounter. To become dis-immunised to the other (cum, the other; beyond me) and experience the relationship as a gift (munus).

The procedures and experiential propositions created collaboratively by the two artists are periodically shared in the environment of experiential workshops, open to the participation of everyone willing to research the vast - and still to be invented – territory of how we live our relationships and distribute our affections/affects.

The workshops propose each time a different set of emerging practices of contamination-attunement between the politics of co(m)passionment and the politics of radical tenderness, always starting from the corporeal plane to investigate other sensitive dispositions - less dependent on identification and understanding - and ways of creating, frequenting and practicing widespread forms of love.

The exercises proposed in the workshops seek to create an environment of trust, acceptance and frankness, in which care can grow in proportion to the risk. They involve sensorial circuits and performative micro-scripts to be experienced in pairs, trios or small groups, circumscribing temporary zones of intimacy with the unknown and the unknowable and inviting participants to experience (and experiment with) states of deliberate vulnerability and of elastic (im)permeability and (dis)comfort.

The Dis-solution Practices

by Fernanda Eugenio and Dani d'Emilia, are part of the artists' investigation around the elasticity of the capacities for intimate connection with the unknown/unknowable and of possible inroads for the activation of politicized, non-hierarchical and disseminated modulations of love. Attuning with the valences of (dis)solvency as a means of researching possible "outer zones" of the hegemonic regime of solution, the Dis-solution Practices work through intimate/personal matters as portals for attunement with the infra and the transpersonal, proposing psychoSOMAgic rituals as invitations to affectively surrender to the fabric of inseparability, resting in the whole spectrum of sensations until its outside/inside edge (dis)integrates.

Placing the Modus Operandi AND and Radical Tenderness in conversation, this collaboration began in 2018 with the Dis-immunization Practices, focusing on ways of reclaiming the affective territories immunized by mechanisms of closure-protection-indifference characteristic of relationships between humans in a hegemonic colonial-capitalistic framework. With the pandemic and its emergency demand for biological immunization, the conditions of proximity that allowed this work in the affective dis-immunization to alterity were compromised. At the same time, it became more urgent to attune with the broader wisdom of Life itself - composed not only by the intertwining with others named as ‘similar’, but also by the entanglement of each one in/as the body of the Earth, and the unlimited vastness of life beyond and below forms. From this context, in 2020, emerged the Dis-Solution Practices, an attempt to make the 'lack of physical contact' between humans an opening for the collectivization of affect, expanding experiments towards a wider repertoire of relational intimacy that mobilizes radical love with other more-than-human forms of life.

The Re-Fusing Experiment

emerges after a trajectory of inquiry into how to extend our modes and fields of intimacy between and beyond the social body into the wider metabolic relations we are constituted by and ongoingly entangled with. Moved by a yearning - and political necessity - for visceral new forms of response-ability and belonging, we are exploring practices that activate inseparability and help us attune to it as a sensitive experience.

This journey started in 2018, when by bringing Modus Operandi AND in conversation with Radical Tenderness, Fernanda and Dani created the Dis-immunisation Practices. The second phase of this journey gave way to another field of relational procedures, the Dis-solution Practices, through which a series of PsychosSOMAgic Rituals emerged.

Now, with this first experiment, we circunscribe a new field of research synthesized into the operation of 're-fusing' - that merges together the gestures of refusal and re-fuse. This is the most recent unfolding of the research, in which in conversation with Sarah Amsler, we propose to deepen this ongoing work to interrupt our internal inscriptions of systemic relations that perpetuate separability through an even wi(l)der queering of intimacies.

As a more direct movement of putting into conversation the pedagogies of AND Lab and the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, this embodied experiment proposes a simple protocol for attending one-to-one relations with more-than-human 'entitings', activating queer relationality modulations that allow exploring-in-act how to co-sense instead of consenting - and so researching ways to reopen and reorient categories and forms (turning 'kinds' into 'kins'), sustaining the question: 'what is it necessary to refuse in order to re-fuse?'