Ways of knowing

… it was towards the morning, when I suddenly realised that someone on the dancefloor was speaking to me in Belarusian. We were at ‘Lecken’, a queer party in Berlin, a city where it has become not unusual to run into my co-expatriates while clubbing. When this happens, the ritual is to go out to share a cigarette and swap the stories of exile before returning to sweat the pain away on the dancefloor. A moment of shared knowledge, when a few words are enough and you do not have to explain much. The new performance ICH HEISSE FRAU TROFFEA by Sergey Shabohin and Igor Shugaleev talks about this: the path leading from the street protests into exile, and then disappearing into the woods of techno. Queer, somatic rituals of dealing with politically induced trauma and loss are also at the core of their second show at SPIELART: 375 0908 2334 THE BODY YOU ARE CALLING IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE which offers the audience a chance to witness, or to participate in, the embodiment of the detainee experience in Belarus – something that tens of thousands of protesters went through, and the feelings of guilt and helplessness connected to forced migration. The performative situation does not tell you a story but rather aims to share bodily knowledge, ‘a reflective, embodied process that can turn sensuous information about the moving body into practical knowledge and self-understanding’ (Jaana Parviainen)^[1].

Performance not as thesis but as experience is also key to Maria Metsalu’s KULTUUR, a festival co-production that premieres at SPIELART this year. She describes the work as ‘something between a piano concerto and a finger-painted surface’, entering into a playful relationship with the audiences who never know what to expect next. Maria sees the performance as a radical space, and performing deviance as a possibility through which new ways of looking and seeing can be created. In Minna Salami’s words, it creates sensuous knowledge, ‘that involves not only the mind and the intellect, but also feeling, the senses, and art, dreams, embodiment, spirit, and the idea of oneself as part of a larger whole’^[2].

Teresa Vittucci, in DOOM, offers a hilarious interpretation of the history of forbidden female knowledge, characters from Eve to Pandora, who, by knowing the world, threaten to destroy the way it is. All those terrifying women who discover things they are not supposed to know, and then everything is lost, forever! Teresa highlights the absurdity of these tales, while leaving the tongue-in-cheek feeling of menace. What if it were true?...

Keeping up with the news cycle is often considered the way of knowing what is happening in the world. However, selecting what is ‘newsworthy’ is a deliberate choice that leaves a lot unsaid. PHOTOS OF SICHOVYKH STRILTCIV STREET by Dmytro Levytskyi takes the audience on a walk-through of ordinary life on one Kyiv street, in a city at war. It zooms in on a small area, on everyday life, on tiny details. In this performance, the audiences get to know the parts of life during the war that remain outside of the news coverage.

Sometimes saying ‘we know’, saying it out loud, can be a powerful gesture. Kavachi, in his durational performance THE CARPET COVERS THE EARTH, rolls out the red carpet in front of the immigration office. This gesture states that we know the experience of applying for a residence permit is designed to be dehumanising and frustrating, and while Kavachi sews the red carpet out of the diverse array of red fabrics donated by the city’s residents, he offers a gesture of defiance towards the system, welcoming everyone who comes to the immigration office as a human being.

Donna Haraway says there is more than one knowledge. Situated knowledges^[3] are rooted in the concrete lived experience of the person knowing. Choreographer Chiara Bersani shares her situated knowledge with the audience, a knowledge of being in nature as a person with motor disability. In her performance SOTTOBOSCO, nature is not a place of rest or meditation – it becomes mysterious, inaccessible, full of threats and secrets.

We will never truly know what it feels like to experience life from someone else’s perspective, but the works of artists offer us a moment of affectivity that lets you be comfortable in someone else’s skin. For a moment, you forget where your body ends and where the other begins. The felt sense of the porosity of bodies is the kind of knowledge the festival produces: discovering many kinds of knowledges, and many ways of knowing.

[1] Online abrufbar/ Available online: bodilyknowledge.com/home
[2] Online abrufbar / Available online: www.whatisemerging.com/profiles/minna-salami-on-sensuous-knowledge-and-black-feminism
[3] Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway, Feminist Studies, 1988.

Eva Neklyaeva's approach as a curator tends to be against and outside fixed genre boundaries - she finds moments of freedom and meaning at the intersections of multiple forms of expression, in writing practice and research. She also curates Samara Editions - performances by post and organizes Afterglow, a series of workshops on desire in Milan, while serving as co-curator for the SPIELART Theatre Festival in Munich. Her work also includes a stint at IUAV University in Venice, where she teaches on curating in the performing arts. In addition, she writes for various-artists.com. From September 2023 she will be responsible for the program at VIERNULVIER in Ghent. For her work, Eva Neklyaeva has so far received two TINFO awards for innovation in theater, a Freedom of Expression Award from the Finnish PEN Association, and an award from the Finnish Sexologists Association for promoting sexual well-being.