workshop led by João Fiadeiro and Fernanda Eugénio, from the 27th of August till the 1st of September at Atelier Real, in Lisbon.

The Handling_Tools workshop is a project that is part of the AND_Lab program, an artistic research and scientific creativity centre based at Atelier Real in Lisbon that affirms itself as a platform for sharing procedures, operations and ways to problem-rising, coming from both art and science, in the relation-tension between politics, ethics and daily life.

Handling_Tools workshop has been designed around the research, systematization and sharing of the concept-tools and operational mode of what we call “mayhapness”, an improvisation practice and collective creation of common landscapes coming from the encounter between the Real Time Composition method developed by the choreographer João Fiadeiro and from the ethnography as a tool for situated performance developed by the anthropologist Fernanda Eugénio.

“Mayhapness” is as “mode of relation” that substitutes the prevailing of the subject, control and manipulation, for an ethic of sufficient handling that transfers the focus to the event emergence.

The term Handling translates the idea of a sharing that goes through the AND_Lab project, proposing two more meanings: accentuating the dimension of engagement and care involved in the infinitesimal procedures of handling, as well as the capacity to “bear” and “support” an ethic of living together that isn’t born out of a pre-set situation and habit, but collectively, in the very act of the encounter.

“To call someone for a party-cipation involves broadening the membrane of the “small group” and opening ourselves to a conversation on the modes of living together, in sharing responsibilities to bring forth and to manage our own surrounding. But how to use what we have to design a territory of party-cipation, frank and reciprocate, when what we have are mechanisms of power that echo almost irresistibly towards representation, demonstration or exposition? And those ones, the first thing that they do is to immobilize the Other, to a certain extent, to the condition of object, removing them the agency and responsibility, cancelling the recently addressed invitation, organizing the event and suspending the hypothesis of the happening as emerging, self-organizing accident. We are therefore thinking about testing ways to turn the emergency of idiorythmic-modes possible to offer the Other the possibility to ethnograph us, making us available as matter, as thing, as fuel to feed a common field of forces, made at the same time as our (our’s and the other’s) autonomy as individual agents of our (our’s and the other’s) just and assumed exposition to relations of co-dependency and reciprocity. Those relations are always to be (re)made, being up to us (to us and to the others) to turn the dispositive we have into a party-cipation in the here and now, but also in a continuous inclination to duration. To call upon a party-cipation involves offering ourselves, but also offering the tools we use – saying them, practicing them with you, exposing them to your handling.”

João Fiadeiro e Fernanda Eugénio

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

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, as well as in the way that Re.al was designed in 1990, with side projects and labs, this interest has been gaining a formal dimension through his regular collaboration with people from other disciplines, such as complex system sciences, neuroscience and anthropology. It’s precisely this question that led him to the encounter with Fernanda Eugénio, who, on her side, came closer to performing arts as a result of a growing concern in relation to the omnipresence of relativist interpretation in the practices of the production of Social Sciences discourses and as something that started, every time more, to appear to her as a neutralization of ethnographic livelihood in the explicative textual coherence and in the authorship-function assumed by the researcher.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The Handling_Tools workshop is open to participants from various artistic and scientific backgrounds that are curious and willing to reflect upon questions we raise. We are looking for participants that can make themselves available to formulate and re-formulate questions around which we build the conditions for living together, whether in art or daily life.

WORKLOAD: 30 horas

TIMES

The sessions will take place between 2pm and 7:00pm.

PRICE

150 EUROS

More information: andlab@re-al.org

Atelier Real has accomodation available to welcome some of the workshop participants.