Particularly in the recent decade, some ways of collaboration have been rehearsed which conceived of collectivity as both motor of and grounds for one’s own aesthetic practice. The cultural-political discourse involved claims that aesthetic practices are subject to socio-dynamic conditions which first and foremost enable artistic collaboration and which therefore have to be taken into account. Reciprocally, the same discourse seems to assume that social communities carry aesthetic potential. Yet, the question is in which way social practices are compatible with aesthetic ones, let alone if they are not equated on false terms. Does the idea of ‚community’ hold strong conditions for the artistic process at all? This Research Project focuses on reading and debating philosophical, anthropological, and sociological texts on community and embeds the reading in the practical building process on the construction site of A Future Archeology.
A construction lot in Vienna during ImPulsTanz 2013. During four weeks, Egyptian and European artists from the fields of choreography, architecture, and dramaturgy construct habitats, huts, or houses: they invite festival participants, guests and passers-by to build spaces of difference, sites for practices and questions of exchange, (cultural) difference, collaboration, and artistic process. The community on test-run amalgamates discursive, social and artistic approaches with strategies of doing and togetherness, aiming at politics of and for diversity. The title A Future Archeology assumes that given (social) structures are to be excavated in order to comprehend their constructedness. Refering to the experience of the current social and political crisis in Egypt and Europe, Silke Bake, Ismail Fayed, Adham Hafez, and Peter Stamer initiated the international project A Future Archeology to embrace the needs and potentials for difference. Taking place in Berlin, Vienna, and Cairo, the international group develops each construction site according to the given urban contexts and actual needs for space.
Focusing on specific questions stemming from the objectives of A Future Archeology, four embedded Research Projects create test fields both shaping and influenced by the building process and its stakes.
With: Silke Bake, Igor Dobricic, Ismail Fayed, Adham Hafez, Peter Stamer, Christine Standfest, Bettina Vismann and guests.
Peter StamerChristine Standfest
