MAYHAPNESS

FRIDAY 1,  SATURDAY 2, SUNDAY 3 JUNE

Culturgest – Pequeno Auditório 21h30

We are here to take a position and to share it through co(m)-position, in “encountering mode”. It’s out of this material, turned explicit and re-positioned from this reciprocal encounter that we aim to extract a way to resist. To re-exist. A way to outline the state of hostage in which the logic of representation locks us in. A way to betray it, just enough to bring the encounter back to the plan of use. Not to deny it, neither to affirm it, but to do with it – since the mechanics of No and Yes would just make it even stronger. To go back instead of forward, thus bringing to a halt the modern kinetics of knowledge that have proliferated and been aggravated, now more than ever, by the collecting vice of “that is this” and in the politically correct loop of “that is this or this, or even this…” Entertainment that anesthetises us through a waste of answers given ad nauseum that, in the meantime, forget to question the question.

Minimum condition: not missing the event and, most importantly, arriving just on time. Disarmed of previous answers, available to catch in the Obvious the emergency of another question. To deactivate the expectation and all its doubles- desires of control and manipulation- that usually make us arrive too early to “knowledge” and too late to “know the edge” of the encounter. To activate, instead, a state of mayhapness, a stand by distracted from all the partis pris that thickens more and more every time we engage ourselves in a more reciprocal estimation, in an openness to the “accident” that is the Other. To activate, also, a responsibility in filigree, ethics of an attentive handling, instead of apathy, of no-show, of a generalised escape, of a disillusioned abandon.

We thus are here to propose a get-togetherness. A have with, a reciprocal holding of the “know-not”. A “stand” just enough time for the interval to shape itself into an “and”, a relation, a reciprocal alteration and a world-broadening. A have with that grows and propagates itself as an environment, a territory for the encounter: a common place but not a common sense.

João Fiadeiro’s trajectory brought him closer to investigation through art, while simultaneously growing distant from choreographic creation and the world of presentation. Even though it had constantly been latent in his artistic work, this interest has been gaininga formal dimension through his regular collaboration with people from other disciplines, such as complex system sciences, neuroscience and anthropology. It has always been his ambition to investigate, question, and experiment with modalities of “how to live together”.

The encounter between Fernanda Eugénio and João Fiadeiro shapesitself in the And_Lab project in which Mayhapness is one of the components. And_Lab aims at becoming aplatform for sharing procedures, operations and ways to “problem-making”coming both from art and sciences, in a relation-tension between politics, ethics and dailylife.

Production: RE.AL – Coproduction: Culturgest in partnership with Alkantara festival
RE.AL is a structure financed by Direção Geral das Artes, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, and Fundação Gulbenkian.