In Terms of (Un)Freedom
In Terms of (Un)Freedom is a three-day Lab to rehearse forms of diverging together. It will be about how to embrace rough, fuzzy, and bumpy intersections between the choreographic, the cinematographic, the archival, the digital and the decolonial in a quest to re-imagine forms of complicated (often understated) collective freedom, away from frantic productivity-performance-oriented demands. Lending an ear to the countless cultural fields and underfields incorporated in our most common practices, we will address how our current vocabularies, somatics and practices of freedom bear colonial and gendered underpinnings and relate to ecological devastation in ways that are not always manifest.
In Terms of (Un)Freedom is intended as a convoluted ecology of practices, unfolding across three coexisting spaces:
RE-WORDING: a space to listen deeply to our vocabularies and vocabulations of freedom. A certain kind of choreo-linguistics engaging with forms of reparative reading, writing, and speaking, to reinforce supportive grounds and surrounds for experimental uses of discourses, terms and translations.
SOMATHEQUE: a space to carefully borrow from an assemblage of gestural traditions of interruption, refusal and insurgency, as suggested by Emma Bigé (Nap-ins. Politiques de la sieste, 2021).
STILL-MOVING: a space to test forms of cine-montage and cinécriture (as in Agnès Varda); to listen to images and “still-moving images” (Campt 2017, 2019); to share forms of “vegetal power and animist cinema” (Castro et al. 2020), to speculate on/with “silly archives” (Halberstam 2011).
The Lab opens with a public wording performance in the morning of the first day, stitching with an ensemble of voices, whispers, scrubs, steps and cracks across the books, podcasts, movies and videos that have been living with me in the past months.
lives and works between Lisbon and Paris, at the blur of theory and fiction, artistic research and archival practices. Since 2005 she has worked extensively on the choreo-cinematographic dimensions of reading, writing and editing, borrowing from the fields of performance studies, expanded choreography and literature, experimental cinema and feminist science studies. She has presented T-Fi [Theory-Fiction] pieces across Europe, Australia, and the USA. In the company of many, she currently studies the ecologies implicated in the kinds of (im)material labour that sustain and maintain museums, archives and history; all addressed as problematic socio-choreographic endeavours. As for institutional life, Caspão is a researcher at the Centre for Theatre Studies, Lisbon University; a lecturer in the same university’s PhD and MD Programme in Theatre Studies; and an associate researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History, UNL Lisbon. She holds a PhD in philosophy (epistemology and aesthetics) from the University Paris-X (2010). She has been a visiting scholar in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2018).
Credits
Participants: Ingrid Cogne, Ruthie Jenruth, Anne Juren, Victoria Perez Royo, Ujjwal Utkarsh