This Lab proposes a practice, an inclusive methodology that locates ways in which we begin to navigate the un-governability of all elements and potentially disruptive information associated with the room. Interrogating the phenomenology of manifestos solicits the inherent polemic: the fear that all things won’t fit to succeed in the imagined dominant path. The room offers an expanded sight for the horizon, no longer obliged to rid oneself of the things that supposedly delay and suspend progress.
Participants are invited to engage with companion materials, bodies and architectures provided on site through a series of improvisational sessions and discussions that build a culture of adjustment where each thing functions as a scaffolding to reach other things. This ‘fixing’ begs for other forms of order than disorder and comes with care taking, danger, and amnesia. Taking to task the integration of each element to the room we will practice ways in which previously disregarded elements are rendered functional, enhancing a contradiction as form itself.
At the centre of this phenomenological approach is an emergent logic that asks what it is to be in place of meaning. In practice, this demands a careful inquiry and attention to the qualities that exercise being, becoming and decaying. Being led by the domination of desire stirs curiosity of how each thing fits. What is potentially lost of masked? Inside this temporary dwelling there is work to be done as we house, acts of labour, intimacy, sexuality and economies of exchange.
This research was developed in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit during the making of performance work titled, «Everything Fits In The Room».
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance and performance and visual art contexts. Simone has received the KFV funding from Stadt Zürich, Kanton Zürich and Prohelvetia between the years 2006 to 2020. Simone was the recipient of the Stadt Zürich recognition prize in 2011 and the prizewinner for the BAK award for best performer in 2015. Simone regularly teachers at academic institutions such as ZHdK and Manufacture in Lausanne as well devising and facilitating elaborate laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge.
Jen Rosenblit (1983. USA) makes performances based in Berlin after many years in New York City surrounding architectures, bodies and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst (un) familiar and impossible contradictions. Rosenblit looks for meaning as it emerges between things and toward an unwinding or possible collapse rather than world building methods. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque(Vevey, CH) artist in residence and has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K.Burns and Philipp Gehmacher. Rosenblit’s newest work, <ElseWhere Rhapsody> is a 2023 co-production of Tanzfabrik Berlin and Tanzquartier Wien, offering distraction as a guide to speak toward the illegibility of desire and forgetfulness as a way to shift toward something else, away from the damaging repetition.
www.jenrosenblit.net