LIE and THEFT as PRACTICE

Next Generation: Lie & Theft as Practice
Goethe-Institut 50, Knez Mihailova Street Belgrade

It has been said that lying is moral. – Matthew Brannon, Interview with Rosa Vanina Pavone, Uovo (April 2006)

The first phase of work on the project titled Lie & Theft as Practice conducted by artist Darko Dragičević within Goethe-Institut’s Next Generation platform constitutes the formation of a team of ten local associates who represent various artistic disciplines. The selection and formation of the transdisciplinary group will be performed on the basis of the exchange of information through which we wish to shake the foundations of the widely known connotation that follows the terms lie and theft, as well as their powers of transformation into newly-devised formats of artistic creation. Our aim is to create a group the members of which are ready to continually take part in a two-year-long cooperation in the construction of materials that will serve as archival objects. Processes of cross-examining the individual body and the knowledge it incorporates, that same body with regards to a different body, and finally the society itself, will serve as materials for introductions, exchange and the creation of a community in which we further interpret the credibility of omnipresent system values through the implementation of a number of practices as potential parameters. From this stand on “cultural capital” we will bring into question the power of archiving itself, as well as the issue of copyrights. In addition to performing arts, the project participants will be given an opportunity to develop textual, digital, musical scores, etc. In the course of the last day of the March phase, the newly-selected participants of the Lie & Theft as Practice project will have a chance, for the first time, to jointly open and begin a dialogue on an assigned two-year topic within the formed group. What follows is a number of workshops in September, November and December of 2019, as well as an exchange of online tasks during the month of May of this current year.

Next Generation: Lie & Theft as Practice
online

Following the formation of the ten-member group, in the first phase of work on the Lie & Theft as Practice project we will launch a number of performance processes through which we wish to contextualize practices that will be an integral part of the contents we will be working on in the course of 2019 and 2020.

The second phase is aimed at introductions, presenting each of the participants to the rest of the group, beginning an exchange of ideas with regards to the terms lie and theft, as well as their potential powers and influence on the devising, development and formation of directions within the framework of artistic creation.

Personal and collective approaches, as newly-found soulutions, will be available via an online platform which will serve as a kind of laboratory through which the processes that have been newly devised by the group will be presented to the public as well.

In the course of the second phase in the month of May, ten associates on the project will have an opportunity to reflect on already existing analytical and critical processes by using different forms of artistic practices, and then commence a two-year round of such processes through which they will open new chapters on the assigned topic by way of discourse.

Collectivism, as a priority, represents the basis of the newly-formed community, the aim of which is to create its own contents, solely by means of cooperation and exchange between its members. This way, we wish to initiate discussions or perhaps offer answers as solutions to certain situations from the grids of the everyday that result from the social-political apparatus.

Phase II, with a duration of two weeks, at the same time represents a platform in the course of which two tasks will be carried out.

Next Generation: Lie & Theft as Practice
Magacin, Kraljevića Marka 4-6, Belgrade

The September workshop of the two-year project "Lie and Theft as Practice", led by Darko Dragičević, is a phase during which collaborators will work on developing movement and speech practices through methodologies derived from contemporary dance, performing and visual arts.

During this two-week phase, we aim to critically analyze the roles and responsibilities of contemporary artistic practices in the pervasive toxic states of society, as well as its effects on the irreversible consequences on the future of our planet. The role of the individual within the group, as well as questions of the authorship through artistic exchanges, are just some of the motives that will serve as materials for the long-term development of potentially embodied solutions.

The first week of the project aims to strengthen the neutral space, the foundations of which are based on mutual trust and support. Tasks and scores from contemporary performing practices will serve to further shape the emerging forms of exchange and collaboration.

During the second week, we will be working on the development of the choreographic materials that will be presented to the public individually, as well as the entire group as a whole, on Friday, September 20th from 8 pm to 10 pm at the premises of the Magacin Cultural Center in Belgrade. This event is also the first presentation of collaborators on the project to the public.

A production by Goethe-Institut Belgrade / Supported by Stanica, Service for contemporary dance Belgrade

Next Generation: Lie & Theft as Practice
Magacin, Kraljevića Marka 4-6, Belgrade

Last, 4th phase of the project ‘Lie & Theft as Practice’ in the year 2019 starts with two Workshops by two German choreographers and dance artists Martin Sonderkamp and Christina Ciupke.

First Workshop which will be held from Friday, November 22nd until Sunday, November 24th is with Martin Sonderkamp currently teaching as Professor of Choreography at DOCH – Stockholm University of The Arts.

About the field of research within the overall topic of ‘Lie & Theft as Practice’, Martin Sonderkamp says the following:

The workshop serves as a platform to sample the ideas, methods and materials that the artists of Lie and Theft have realized since the beginning of the project. Stealing is translated into amicable lending and borrowing and lying into appropriating through embodying and becoming. Each artist explores, in a short time, methods of transmission and transposition, re-play and imitation and is challenged to develop the necessary skills to perform the work created.

Second workshop from November 29th to December 1st, 2019 is with Berlin based choreographer and performer Christina Ciupke. For the purposes of the Workshop Christina Ciupke writes the following:

Everything that is processed by memory is, to some extent, fiction and appropriation of various sources. We continuously mix our own stories and references with the stories of others. The process of memory is voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious, an ongoing layering of collective memory.

When does reality blur? Where are the limits of fiction?

Do we walk a blurred line between fact and fiction, between appropriation and theft, when we tell the story of a story, when we write a poem inspired by another poem, when we write a line of text, when we improvise a movement that is always based on the memory of a movement, when we reinvent a song that we hardly remember?

In the workshop Lie & Theft as Practice I want to give an impulse to retrace how to think about the original, the real, the own and the alienated.

Furthermore, 10 days period after the second Workshop will serve to reflect, discuss and deepen the dialogue with the artistic collaborators of the project ‘Lie & Theft as Practice’ which will be used to deepen and further facilitate the upcoming collaboration in 2020 but also to start the processes of archival and selection of the materials for the book/catalogue under the same title.

Prior to the encounter in February in Belgrade the artistic collaborators on the project Lie & Theft as Practice will engage with two practical tasks over the course of five weeks. The purpose of these tasks are the implementations in urban landscape. Their aim is the engagement of the group in the upcoming site-specific formats that will further develop over this year during different phases.

The outcomes of the documented materials will be presented to the rest of the group in the first week of the Workshop in February.

With site-specific actions in public space we are aiming to try out and experiment with various practice based possibilities in which those that were already applied over the past year in the studio space, and during which the collective body between the group members was created, will be further applied on the streets of Belgrade. In this way, using different media as political strategies in which the bodies play the main tools of resistance, we want to observe, question and ulitmately implement parallel lines of actions. Visible, or maybe even invisible at first glance.

We believe in the necessities of the reconfigurations in deeply rooted and instrumentalized ‘facts’.

Staying within the frame of performative practices we are posing a question: How can art be more politically engaged in these times of extremely precarious political and economical turmoil? What is the role of individual during these shifts in relation with the others? How can we support each other in more meaningful ways in order to create the arguments that could, perhaps, reach out to the others? We want to increase the awareness that systems need to be questioned over and over again in order to create a discourse. Without discourses or alternative ways of being and functioning our own purposes are lost.

For us, the discourse as a critique needs to be applied in practice and always in relation to other bodies in the public space.

We do not want to associate the terms lie and theft with exclusively negative connotations. If these terms are used in more imaginary or even more original ways they could lead to the creations of more positive outcomes.

Furthermore, if they are erected on already existing constructs, they could provide alternative ways in which failure, empathy or different kinds of vulnerabilities, could provide the new tools of resisting the overall powers of consumption coming from political and economical machineries.

Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević

Artistic Director: Darko Dragičević

Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević

Project Director: Frank Baumann

Artistic Collaborators (and Workshop participants): Stevan Beljić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković

Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut in Serbia within the Next Generation platform.

The last paragraph of the text for the previous phase of the project, related to the terms ’’lie and theft as practice’’ reads: …Furthermore, if they are erected on already existing constructs, they could provide alternative ways in which failure, empathy or different kinds of vulnerabilities, could provide the new tools of resisting the overall powers of consumption coming from political and economical machineries.

This text was written in late January 2020. By the end of February, the Corona happened. The virus has spread throughout the world. During the course of this virus, many people have lost their lives, and the uncertainties that continue to accompany us every day make us more vulnerable than we were before the virus situation. More vulnerable certainly in a positive way.

Every day we get information about the consequences of the current situation. The ’’consequences“ are mainly related to the economic state of society.

The Coronavirus situation seems to have led us to finally reflect on some of the key issues that make up our daily lives and to ask ourselves, once again, perhaps for the last time, whether we still want to live in a world whose future is already well known scenario?

In contexts of lies and theft, I often think that these are actually two of the most basic values of modern society. It is enough to take as an example almost all of today’s cultural institutions e.g. world museums and read a list of their major sponsors. It mainly lists major oil companies, and even those companies that, in their financing history, play a major role in world wars solely out of interest.

Knowing this, then we must question what is inevitable: what is the role of the individual in that society? How much does that individual or entire social groups, not to mention minorities!, in any social system across the globe have any rights or in the broadest sense of the power to change at all the systems that have evolved over the past decades and then emerged over this century?

Large corporations, behind which very few incredibly powerful people stand, decide the future of our planet and inevitably the future of all living beings on that planet.

I find that Coronavirus provides a space where new ideas can emerge that will create spaces for dialogue, discourse formation, and afterwards, which will provide opportunities to change a system that is by no means good and whose outcome is terrifying. It is now up to us to recognize that moment and so something about it.

It is in such a given environment that it is important to start from the small steps, always having in front of you the idea of developing a bigger picture of yourself as an individual as part of the social community.

The role of art is to keep up with its contents in parallel to the development of the situation and to go one step ahead, following motto of Joseph Beuys “Every human being is an artist.“ Only then does art cease to be purely elitist and become purely activist.

During the sixth phase of work on the project “Lie and Theft as Practice“, instead of the planned interventions in the public space, a group of six artistic collaborators will continue to relate to each other through new tasks and continue to strengthen the established collective body, this time in contexts of related situations with the development of the Coronavirus. These tasks are aimed at rethinking, self-reflection and inevitable criticism through the prisms of the documentation process, through which we will try to leave a mark that will surely have some echo in the broadest contexts of the future developments of humanity today. Maybe like some sort of victories or complete crashes.

Lastly, I would like to end this introductory text for Phase VI of the “Lie and Theft as Practice“ project with Ann Cotten text I had read in her 2016 book Lather in Heaven:

Beauty cannot lie, not without using its complete existence. And then of course you could say that the beauty of lying is that it changes your complete existence.

Darko Dragičević

Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević
Artistic Director: Darko Dragičević
Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević
Project Director: Frank Baumann
Artistic Collaborators (and Workshop participants): Stevan Beljić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković

Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut Serbia within the Next Generation platform.

This erosion of individual privacy can be benign or malevolent. But it is already a part of life in the Anthropocene.

\ Gaia Vince

Phase VII of the project ’’Lie & Theft as Practice“ is the completion or continuation of the processes that occured during 2019 and 2020. During this phase, artistic collaborators will have the opportunity to implement feedback into the processes of their colleagues. Feedback will be in textual and visual form.

In this way, we once again want to address copyright issues in the broader contexts of artistic creation.

Since the coronavirus is still going on, we will not be able to collaborate in Belgrade and continue with interventions in public space. Because of this situation, we continue online collaboration during which we further expand the virtual spaces, which are certainly becoming the most powerful tools of the resistance system.

Through online networks, people around the world organize public gatherings, demonstrations and protest walks. It is important that we collectively recognize the possibilities of change in them at such specific moment in time.

Around the world, there are spaces of continents, countries and cities, as well as people who live in them. Today, there are virtual – online spaces – invisible continents, countries and cities, as well as their inhabitants, who know no physical boundaries, as well as measures of social systems of everyday life.

It is important to work on empowering virtual spaces, as well as their inhabitants – people around the world, who by exchanging ideas make friends, create pressure for change, innovation, as well as the spread of political and artistic talents. These are spaces where, through dialogue with others, because of our anonymity, we can resist systems through shared creativity in problem solving.

Our task and obligation is to recognize this moment that cries out for change, and which excludes a return to a ’’normal“ state before the onset of the virus. If we recognize it, that moment will enable us to no longer step into the one-way streets that we have collectively built, but to imagine and start with the construction of a wide boulevard.

At this point, nothing can be worse than a return to ’’normality“.

Darko Dragičević

Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević
Artistic Director: Darko Dragičević
Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević
Project Director: Frank Baumann
Artistic Collaborators (and Workshop participants): Stevan Beljić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković

Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut Serbia within the Next Generation platform.

When a friend asked me how are you? I replied Great, and you? She replied me too.

- excerpt from the Diary of Lana Pavkov, Belgrade, May 2, 2020

The eight phase “Lie & Theft as Practice” is also the last one of a two-year project. The project itself could not be realized as it was conceived due to the situation with the Covid19 pandemic. This impossibility was mainly reduced to cooperation in the context of performative interventions in the public spaces of Belgrade. The situation with the virus brought us closer within the group itself. Spaces of collaborations based on the principles of togetherness, exchange, empathy and vulnerability, in themselves, naturally developed further between artistic collaborators.

The topics we deal with day by day are becoming strategies of international policies with the support of most international institutions in which the role of the individual, as well as entire communities, is incresingly on the margins. When we bring in the role and position of artists, as well as cultural workers, not to mention those who deal with the independent cultural scene, then the picture of the current situation becomes completely clear. This is where the question then arises; what is actually true, what is theft? I claim that there is not so much talk about lies, even theft, because we all know that they are there and that they are so recognizable. Issues related to the notion of truth are topics for discourse and dialogue. It is within the framework of finding these answers that we come to the realization that each of us on a daily basis only ’performs’ values that also support the machineries that ’teach’ us what they actually mean. In that way, we are actually creating a history that we all collectively stand for, and which we no longer understand at all.

The artistic team of the project “Lie & theft as Practice” composed of six young and brave individuals, will be joined by a group of international activists, artists and cultural workers across Europe. These are Pia Brezavšček (SI), Christina Ciupke (DE), Ann Cotten (AT), Marijana Cvetković (RS), Konstantina Georgelou (GR/NL), Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir (ISL/DE) and Martin Sonderkamp (DE/SE).

Together, we are currently collecting materials created during 2019 and 2020, which we will combine in a book called “Lie & Theft as Practice”, the first working version of which we will send to press in December this year.

Darko Dragičević

Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević
Artistic Director: Darko Dragičević
Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević
Project Director: Frank Baumann

Artistic Collaborators (and Workshop participants): Stevan Beljić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković

External contributors: Pia Brezavšček, Christina Ciupke, Ann Cotten, Marijana Cvetković, Konstantina Georgelou, Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Martin Sonderkamp

Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut Serbia within the Next Generation platform.