Both working in a region of the world that is excluded - accidentally and/or purposefully - from the process of generating discourse on contemporary culture, the artists will re-enact different 'we(s)', each time producing a fictitious critical position that results in embodying different alter-egos, producing together with present artists and attendees performances that unsettle entrenched dichotomies of 'East' and 'West' and ossified stereotypes of 'Oriental' subjects. Through a process of continuous "reinvention" of artificial subjectivities, this Field Project will unearth the institutional, structural and cultural dynamics that create and sustain such constructs by engendering bizarre yet seemingly "intelligible" critical constructs. The Research Project aims at highlighting the intellectual disparity regarding privileging Western discourse over 'the rest', emphasising the myopic vision in dealing with "other" critical propositions that are often seen as 'ethnic', 'folkloric', 'kitsch' or 'incomprehensible'. Operating on the premise that fiction simulates and creates reality, the narrative created will simulate and 'invent' a condition where subjects might 'transcend' their biological and cultural constraints and assume a hybridised 'identity' that might become intelligible only through performance.
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.
