There are countless ways of existing with each other, if we assume our body does not end with our skin. How can the other inspire me to enter spaces that are not occupied by a ’You' and an 'I'?
Since 2009 Gradinger and Schubot's topic has been the de-bordering of the body. In their work, they have attempted to reorganise the relationship between the 'I' and the 'You', in the search for other forms of co-existence. The next chapter in the work seems to be pointing our attention towards renegotiating 'the I and the We'. With this Field Project we aim to create a performative sphere that can effortlessly shift between the (un)familiar constellations, where 'I am You' can become 'We are You' or …'I am We'…
We start with a training that aims to undo the habits of the body and perception and expands its current comfort zone. By exploring and widening inner and outer spaces we will find a mutable body full of vibrations, sensations and fantasies and discover the realities and performative potential that such a body does create. Through partnering work based on extreme physicality (breath, exhaustion, duration, full-dropping) we will test how imagination can become real and how our reality can literally be transformed.
This work searches for a freedom from a habituated, implicated self, through the creation of a new body which enables the conditions for being in a state of constant 'becoming'.
In the end of the week we will place our experiences in a more performative context and question, how those experiences can be lived, performed and shared with and in front of the eyes of an audience. What kind of artistic settings are needed? How will being watched change our presence? Do we allow that change? Do we invite it?
Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot's starting point is the search for an unconditional togetherness to escape from one's own identity. Since 2009, they have created four full-length works circling around the dissolution of the self. Trying to reach other forms of co-existence. Fluently the pieces seem to melt into each other: The relentless exhaustion of the 'I' in order to make it disappear in "what they are instead of" becomes the symbiotic, faceless hybrid-creature in "is maybe", becomes a 'dying together' as the ultimate impossibility of being together in "i hope you die soon", becomes a double-creature that dies for a third in “all my holes are theirs“. Their work has been presented throughout Europe, South America and Australia, in many different contexts internationally often combined with teaching and research.
