Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation

On December 3–6, 2020, the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance will host Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation, a series of online exchanges between artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts. Together, artists reflect on their shared and differing understanding of what vital concerns, methods, and gestures are called for by the pressing challenges faced at both local and transnational levels. Artist pairings include: Yasuko Yokoshi and mayfield brooks, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Okwui Okpokwasili, Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Lewis, as well as Eleonora Fabião and Jelili Atiku.

How do singular, dispersed artistic gestures teach us ways of listening, touching, and assembling across distance and difference? How can interdisciplinary performance practices articulate the felt and embodied relations of global uprisings happening both through and against the networked ecologies that capitalize on our attention? Staging a series of open conversations, Choreographies of the Archipelago invites artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts to reflect on both their shared and differing understanding of what vital concerns, methods, and gestures are called for by the pressing challenges faced at both local and transnational levels. From the immediacy of state violence and the rise of autocracy, to the ongoing and ever intensifying struggle against the separatist and extractive logics of capitalist and colonialist regimes, art’s world-making capacity has never been more essential to forging a collective future. These dialogues invite artists to discuss how their creative and critical practices may participate in this diverse endeavor, while pushing back against the demand that art serves as a symbol of global salvation.

The title draws on Édouard Glissant’s foresight that “the entire world is becoming an archipelago” to reaffirm the necessity of thinking singularities in common while resisting epistemological fixity and political homogeneity. Instead of dictating a way forward, these online dialogues emerge as a score for movement and variation; they stage a virtual rehearsal for the metamorphosis of an era and the dissolution of a stable paradigm of “the global.” Generous support for this event has been provided by the Ford Foundation.

Banner image: Tanya Lukin Linklater, video still from This moment an endurance to the end forever, 2020.