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.