For this month’s newsletter performingborders presents our new research paths, carved out as desire lines in our practice. These intertwined interests and ideas have manifested in a new constellation of work that we hope to grow and develop into wider research. In this process, we’re excited to create relationships with new collaborators as well as dive deeper with people who are already a part of PB’s existing connections.
Based on her ongoing research of equitable forms of organising within the cultural and live art sector, Alessandra has started On Work, a series of interviews with UK-based and international practitioners to learn, unlearn, gather and share knowledge to build safe and fair spaces for collective labour. This month’s newsletter hosts interviews with queer feminist practitionners Giulia Casalini and Niya B, and artists Jack Ky Tan whose work explores ‘the social, the legal and art’.
Rooted in her ongoing thinking around bodies and performance in feminist practice, Anahi starts Bodies in Resistance/ Encuerpando Resistancia, focusing on the body as a site of resistance. It is a series in dialogue with artists, activists, and those sitting in spaces of embodied practice, referencing the legacy of feminist Latin American movements and their work choreographing resistance. This evolving conversation-as-research aims to connect practices across the Abya Yala diaspora, linking performance/political practices as well as body/minds across borders. This month Anahi thinks with Thais Di Marco to explore political performance practices, inherited legacies, and choreographies of power.
Starting from performingborders’ own transnational work over the years, Xavier is engaging in research on language, translation and cross-border working methodologies, starting with conversations with artists mandla, Ana Rocha and Two Destination Language. Fronteiras taps into how language and perception of cultural signifiers changes when working transnationally. Fronteiras is the word for borders in Portuguese, yet the contextual connotations around it allude to a more movement-based understanding of what is the border: the border as a frontier, a site of possibilities amidst oppressive systems.
We want to be intentional about the way we create resources and how we connect to each other's research and by extension the work of our collaborators. This is why we see these new series not as parallel lines or separate universes, but as interconnected cosmological visions.
With care, Alessandra, Anahi, Xavier
On Work | Alessandra Cianetti with Jack Ky Tan and
Giulia Casalini + Niya B
"So, my projects usually start with a kind of flirting between me and an institution. We date. We talk. We look into each other’s eyes. We brainstorm. We enthuse about our coming life together on the project."
Jack Ky Tan
"We believe that our performances can be meaningful for those experiencing them as well as for our personal dynamics as friends/lovers/collaborators."
Giulia Casalini and Niya B
Bodies in Resistance / Encuerpando Resistancia| Anahi Saravia Herrera with Thais Di Marco
"What is neo liberalism in the art market and how do we recognize it? What is it? What is the political project behind it? How is this impacting the possibility or the impossibility of organizing collectively among artists?" Thais Di Marco
Fronteiras |Xavier de Sousa with Two Destination Language, Ana Rocha & mandla rae
"The why for us comes from the fact that we are ourselves very different from one another - from our cultures and languages, to upbringing: rules, expectations, values."
Two Destination Language
"A sort of parkour in the European arts scene is a cross-border, transverse act in itself and it's hard to deny the ever changing circumstances, the need to adapt, to readjust, the capacity to shape-shift the self in body language, spoken expression and intention" Ana Rocha
"Even when people know the language I speak, I personally don’t think they’re getting much more context than a non-isiNdebele speaking audience member. (...) It’s a challenge for myself as a writer and performer, how well can I tell a story?" mandla
1- Tan, Jack Ky. ‘Dyslexia-friendly and Easier-to-read artist contract’ part of FACT Liverpool Board Artist’s Residency, 2022. FACT Liverpool. https://www.fact.co.uk/resources/2022/03/easy-read-artist-contract
2- InXestuous Sisters, Galatea, 2021, Photo by Eda Sancakdar
3- Image of The Goldfish Bleeding in a Sea of Sharks - Wrestling Club, performed at FLAM Amsterdam in May 2022. Courtesy of the artist, performance photos by Thomas Lenden & David Cenzer.
4- Two Destination Language, picture courtesy of the artist
5- Ana Rocha, picture courtesy of the artist
6- Image from as british as a watermelon, 2021, Photo by Paul Blakemore
performingborders is a curatorial research-platform that explores the relations between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, and everyday borders.Taken care of by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa, and Anahí Saravia Herrera.
