The live arts which, with different nuances in terms of their position in time, place and context, have also been labelled time-based arts, arts vivants, performing arts and performance art, show the breadth of the contemporary practices and languages that manifest themselves in a time frame and on-site space. They cross through and bring together bodies, movements, sounds and visions in an experience that never winds up or isolates into an aesthetic object but that becomes situated knowledge.
Disciplinary enfranchisement from languages leads in the direction of the direct liveability of operating: this applies inside and outside the institutional framework. Wherever a situated dimension of experience is produced. Under the influence of the physical nature of liveness, visual arts also become a field “to be practised” rather than a place of static emotional perception, a depot/device of the gatekeepers’ selective and productive result. By the same token, the performing arts borrow from the museum the idea of flow and synchronicity: the stage does not disappear, it explodes and expands to absorb the stalls and the entire technical apparatus.
The live arts do not exist independently of human experience, of the body and its relationships. That is why they have brought together different thrusts leading to the identification of a non-existent and as yet unconstituted device capable of condensing the different modalities of the timing of experience, between collectivisation and subjectivity, between simultaneity and succession.
Grey areas, landscapes, skyscapes and green spaces have become the last horizons of the epidemic experience. We ask ourselves whether walking and moving are the art we need today. And whether the creation of paths, the opening up of windows in our mind as well as physical windows may not be the forms needed to carry on down the road to inclusiveness involving and empowering us.
Silvia Fanti and Daniele Gasparinetti are the art directors of Xing. They have both co-founded and co-directed independent groups involved in transdisciplinary research, including Link Project (1994>2000) and Xing (2000>). Xing is an independent not-for-profit institution that moves in a field of multiple skills from visual culture to the performance arts, from sound to the new forms of communication, using different linguistic, social and economic devices. From 2000 to the present day Xing has produced or supported over 1,000 artists at the national and international levels, involving both public- and private-sector partners, inventing anomalous formats and often unprecedented executive platforms connected with time-based arts. The projects that have marked specific cycles in their multi-annual research include: Netmage International Live Media Festival (2000>2011), F.I.S.Co. Festival Internazionale sullo Spettacolo Contemporaneo (2000>2011) and Live Arts Week (2012>2021). In 2020 they launched a new splinter project, a record label devoted to figures active in the varied world of performance art: Xong collection. Since 2003 they have also been curating an ongoing research programme in their own Raum spaces. They have currently trigggered a reflection on the post-pandemic prospects of live arts, digging a series of holes, moments for temporarily redefining the public space.
www.xing.it www.liveartsweek.it