Research project DRafting Togetherness

The crisis in Greece has proved it necessary to not only pose important questions of solidarity but also to practice new ways of learning how to live, think, and learn together. The recent European rhetorics of guilt and blame reflect this shortcoming of a common practice: in the end we all do sit in the same boat. Now the first question is not who is rowing the boat, but how do we keep it up and running, how to keep it waterproof in times when tides are getting higher than we are able to deal with. Thus the question is not anymore who are the ones who steer (who is the captain?), who are the ones who are said to be ‘parasitic’ (‘stowaway’ passengers), but rather: how to construct such a boat in order to make it through stormy weathers of political and social crisis? We would like to interpret this question not just metaphorically but take it at face value by building a raft together.
Silke Bake (D), Ash Bulayev (US), Zoi Dimitriou (GR), and Peter Stamer (D), being artists from the fields of choreography, performance, and theatre want to conduct the first phase of their research project on creating communality on Syros in August 2015. In a series of meetings, encounters, working sessions both situated in the Akropoditi dance centre and in town, we want to undertake preliminary steps towards the building of floating structures in 2016.

Finding out how things go, leaving routines behind, circumnavigating given knowledge, conquering new ways of appropriation and sharing is part and parcel of our adventure – and it’s that kind of curiosity we would ask people to come with.
Our work methodology entails to start with the landscape we are working in, using the material we find, fabricating the tools we are in need of, taking the circumstances into account and thus produce the knowledge, skills, and intelligence we require to work together.

In this research phase in summer 2015, we want to get acquainted with the actual circumstances the crisis has produced in Europe and develop practical methods of collaboration that base upon the following assumptions:
– By implementing an objective of and for collaboration we create togetherness and communality with the means of artistic tools
– By negotiating of what it needs to bring this boat or raft afloat we learn more about techniques and practices of ourselves and each other than any kind of political rhetorics can provide us with
– By working with a multi-disciplinary, socially and culturally heterogenous group of people we understand more about political processes than listening to so-called decision makers
– By learning together we give each other the chance to overcome the arrogance of those who seem to know better and the ignorance of those who’d rather abstain from committing themselves

Since we are steered by the conviction that sharing practices exercise democracy and agonistic togetherness we wish for this project to take a noteworthy stand on the challenges the economic crisis imposes on contemporary Europe, Greece and its citizens.

Supported by Bundeskanzleramt Österreich, Akropoditi Dance Centre Syros