STÖRUNGEN (Disturbances) by bello benischauer
three live performances/interventions in public space at the Swizz Performance Art Festival PERFORM NOW! in Winterthur, Switzerland, 3 to 6 October 2013 with a Performance Lecture at the accompanying Symposium TRANS:SCRIPT – Kunsthalle Winterthur.
Artistic idea (original text in German):
People tell each other lies
and spread the news onto the streets of our Cities
news that the media impose on us
people add their personal opinions
building a State’s general consciousness.
Only the individual
has the opportunity to escape such a cycle
when acting disciplined
and forcing oneself to be that individual person. This can keep us alive.
The more we can do this successfully,
the better we manage to influence our surroundings. We human beings carry the energies within
Occupy time and space
infect our living environment.
Just a small change can already work a great deal in this complex construct of thoughts.
Performative art as a socio-cultural intervention. ART IN PROCESS discusses how identity, a feeling of belonging and diverse issues concerning a multicultural society can lead to social isolation, based on language and cultural barriers. AIP explore different living environments by using multidisciplinary media in participatory processes that focus on the use of experimentation and improvisation techniques. Art as a social transmitter, looking at spacial conditions: How do we adopt a space? By force, gentle, obsessive, overlapping, destructive, integrating, energetic,… ?
Various interventions in strongly frequented public space during the Festival aimed for the attempt to slow down the surrounding environment and its passersby. Disturbances occur as soon as we intrude the space of somebody else, which happens on a constant basis. A little disturbance, even of seemingly insignificant nature, can affect people’s daily life. Actions, planned to have positive effects, can easily degenerate into disturbances for some – felt as a negative influence by the people behind the action, the surrounding environment and its passersby.
Various local participants helped to shape the interventions in Winterthur. They were directed through the process. Bello wanted to proof how easily an action could change from positive into negative and vice versa, depending on the balancing act of social behaviour, which is based on our understanding of normality and/or behavioural disorders.
The interventions took place by using what happened to be available onsite, reacting to the public space, the participants’ input and the passersby. What appears to be strongly improvised, was directed through Bello’s perceptible and often (even for the participants) not visible instructions that he had based on a staged but still open concept.
TEMPORÄRES ENSEMBLE
Patrícia Flores
Portuguese
Sabine Heusser Engel
German
Mirta von Bergen
Spanish
Irena Kulka
German
Zeljko Lukic
Serbo-Croatian
Francesco Spedicato
Italian