OCCUPY PROJECT#2 (GRÈCE) FR
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Sozita Goudouna
Credit photo: Sozita Goudouna
Sozita Goudouna Dr. Sozita Goudouna is a professor, curator and the author of "Beckett's Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts" published by Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism released in the US by Oxford University Press. According to William Hutchings' review, Goudouna’s book is "surely the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism." .Her internationally exhibited projects include participations at Performa Biennial in New York, Documenta, Onassis Foundation Festival, New Museum, Hunterian Museum, Benaki Museum, Byzantine Museum, EMST Contemporary Art Museum among others.She is head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio and visiting professor at City University New York (CUNY) and New York University. She is researcher at the Organism for Poetic Research supported by New York University and Brown University and has taught from 2015 at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial fellow at Performa Biennial in NYC. She is the founding director of the US non-pro\t “Greece in USA” for the promotion of contemporary Greek art. She served as treasurer of the board of directors of AICA Hellas International Art Critics Association and as member of the board of directors at ITI International Theatre Association, Unesco. More at: https://cuny.academia.edu/DrSozitaGoudouna
(Un)occupied: On the entanglement of Occupiers, Collaborators and Care (In)occupé: Sur l’enchevêtrement des Occupants, Collaborateurs et des Soins
Sozita Goudouna avec Vassilis Salpistis, Marie Voignier, Katerina Christidi, Sebastien Planas. Our project argues for collaborative authorship and art activism as a way of thinking and performing social and political crises. Written, imagined and practiced collectively by artists, curators and scholars, OCCUPY#2 unfolds along four interlocking sites: political/national identities, institutions/collectives, aesthetic/ethics and caregiving. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the real with the artful and the interconnectedness of the artwork to a particular environment/location/country is of primary concern, for OCCUPY#2, and in creating a space where aesthetic politics and ethics could be performed. As Lefevre proposed, in actuality, “ideal” space, that has to do with ‘mental (mathematico-logical) categories and “real” space, and the space of social practice are not separate, on the contrary each of these two kinds of space involves, underpins and presupposes the other’ (Lefevre 1991:14). Can we occupy an institutional space and overcome the various hierarchies? As Frantz Fanon wrote in his book A Dying Colonialism, there is ‘no occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, dis\gured, in the hope of a \nal destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.’ Our “occupied breathing” and aesthetic “gathering” registers a different kind of conscious, intersubjective occupying that allows for a “collective imaginary occupation” and for a collective processing of perceptions associated with socio-aesthetics. Mobilizing a choreo-social analytic in the public space of the French Embassy to examine techniques of identity making whether national, personal/psychological or political. Aiming to mobilize an “affective response” both from the participants and viewers. This shared practice, as a collaborative process of spatial (occupying space) transformation, can be seen as a form of ‘commoning’ our means of knowledge production. ‘Commoning’ as response to neoliberal capitalism’s effort to control different forms of life and knowledge, as refusal to see oneself separate from others: ‘if “commoning” has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject’ (Federici, 2012: 145). How do we choreograph commoning? The function and notion of “leveraging this commoning and collectivity” in the face of (power formations) hierarchies becomes a central theme of this initiative. The non-hierarchical and democratic might describe our process and our shared collaborative labor. Thus, the performance of interdependent care at OCCUPY#2 aims to explore and unravel political sensibilities. The caring subject is attuned to the bodies of others and as Maurice Hamington argues, ‘this does not suggest that caregivers are artists […] but it does suggest that caregivers are artists in terms of being aesthetically attuned to the bodies, actions, and relations of themselves to others’ ( 2015:279). Our performance of “care” in a public institution like the French Embassy aims to capture the active perceptual engagement of the viewer and also generates an explicit awareness of this activity. Maaike Bleeker introduces the term ‘seer’ for ‘spectator’ in order to denote the activity of the former and the passivity of the latter. Thus, the ‘seers’ are not reduced to a state of unquestioning awareness or a wholly passive relation to the object as a detached subject. Interaction, engagement and response are required for a novel understanding of the notion of occupying. We look forward to your participation!
(Un)occupied: On the entanglement of Occupiers, Collaborators and Care