COLECTIVO UTÓPICO

International exchange in specific contexts

Argentina | Brazil | Switzerland

#episode 1 Bahia

instrucciones

camping UFBA

INTERVENICÓN
 DE DIOGO LINS

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DE DIOGO LINS
Y LUISA MEIRELLES

COME 
TOGETHER

workshop Imitar - Copiar- Reactivar

#episode 2 Buenos Aires

workshop Looping e overdub: Pensamiento sonoro

Performance Telling

F***book club, ep. 1

by Felipe de Assis

Gracias al grupo por el espectáculo.
Mi "Performance Telling" es un tributo al trabajo que me transportó a una película de Tarantino, un ritual evangélico en el interior de Brasil, una Murga en Palermo. Justicia para Sandrita.

Lectura de parte de las sinopsis del espectáculo:
En Éxtasis y Demonios aparece la relación entre el cuerpo femenino y lo sobrenatural. Videntes, costaleras, brujas, histéricas, poseídas y penitentes exploran los usos políticos de la creencia. Delirios febriles, oscuridad, perturbaciones provisorias y gloria divina.
Para este ejercicio, en lugar de decirte lo que vi, quería probar algunos procedimientos.

Quítate la chaqueta / campera. Se pinta las manos y los brazos con carbón. Activa el video y comienza a reproducir los sonidos que lo acompañan con el controlador MIDI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbwwsrGH73Q

Práctica de Performance Telling do espetáculo
Corina Wilson. Éxtasis y Demonios
Buenos Aires, dezembro, 2019.
Felipe de Assis

Open Studio

Utopia
etymologically
No place
A word invented by Thomas More
an English theologian
to title a book written in Latin,
Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo reipublicae statu, deque nova insula Vtopi
that is to say
A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in the new island Utopia.
A book from 1516
Where he imagines from Europe an island located somewhere near South America.
Only a quarter of a century after the arrival of foreign explorers to this territory.
Or north of this territory.
The original accumulation
America
Latin
America
Latin America.
.
Then a project begins
Skype
Whatsapp
Gmail
Instagram
planes
cancellations
date changes
support seeking
file reviewing
logos
and at last face-to-face meeting in Salvador da Bahia.
Breakfast in paradise
babies
plants
monkeys
coffee
smiles
individual introductions
going to the work space.
.
We have a website
that we use to write down
collectively
what we're feeling.
.
The first thing is to share music
karaoke
be together
train together.
Risk everything
make a fool of oneself
discover who doesn't take their socks off to dance
who can sing
who talks a lot
who makes the right comment.
.
Now it's about making decisions
collectively and horizontally
disengage the power
of words,
of speeches,
of arguments,
of reason.
We surrendered to randomness
we consulted the oracles,
over and over again.
With a plastic bottle, a laptop mouse, an internet generator, Chinese and Brazilian texts and luck.
And then we decided to get organized
politically
To experiment with it
denaturalize it.
Paint your village
A genealogy of power
western
small-scale
in a group of five.
The first thing is
to govern
by divine command.
Who chooses a queen?
How does one choose a first queen?
Does it have to be the richest person?
The most spiritual?
The one who came first?
The most European?
Then the solution is to blow some leaves with our names on them until fate or our natural force reveals a winner.
There is a king (he is European)
Long live the queen.
The next day there is an election and someone runs and has no opponent and wins and is president. It's a woman. She's not afraid to take on positions of power. She holds office until the evening and then we vote directly on each of our decisions and we continue to use chance or consult the queen, we set rules and then we break them until we are left floating in a consensus, with latent dissent, in a small but possible state of Anarchy.
.
Utopia is no place
a word that takes us to the past or the future but it's never here
In "No Place" there's no time, it's always the beginning.
So now
we investigate further
we dive into books
and youtube videos
and wikipedia.
Concepts appear
strong
defined
frictional
academics
or premises
We argue.
Non-linear thinking
decolonizing the views
changing the feelings.
An agreement is found.
To bring utopia to the present,
to summon it,
give it a place.
.
We set up a tent
we write together
we try some texts
dramatic, something like
The audience enters a room. It's dark. In the middle of the room, there’s a tent. Tomas is searching for something. For ten minutes. For ten minutes, really.
He takes it easy. He never gets restless. He finds it. It was his glasses.
Felipe, who is also there, is activating some devices that emit sounds of birds, wind, animals and air and reaches to unknown inorganic forms. It's almost too beautiful to be true. Tomas observes everything. With the help of his flashlight, he wants to get something to write with from the tent. A pen. It's not where it should be. He looks for it for 30 seconds. He finds it. Marina wakes up, and from the tent she pokes her head out. They communicate with gestures asking "what's wrong?", with gestures they answer "I can't sleep". Marina insists "come back to the tent", and Tomas points to his notebook and his ear and answers "no, I'll stay here a little longer to listen".
Time passes. Tomas whistles and calls Marina back to ask her "Are we, humans, special or not among other existing species?" Marina answers "We’re not sure". Then they debate whether the ability to poeticize the world, the creative act in general, laughter, are specificities and conclude that they are not. Felipe says: "The other species are tired of us and our arrogance."
Paula comes out of the tent and does a kind of Argentinian Tai Chi Chuan, while smoking. And the scene continues in the same way.

But we didn't want to be so dramatic.
It was just a drift
on the way.
The only thing that remained was the idea of camping
with others
building a space with a specific community
and sharing visions and activities.
We tried it
at night
at the university.
And we did well
and bad
We received intense feedback
we had fans
and detractors.
It was deep.
Beautiful
Ser intervenido
cambiar el pensamiento
irrumpe la historia personal
en qué creemos
quienes de nosotros tienen dioses
cuales son

And the next day we exploded inside
intervention
changing the way to think
personal history breaks out
what do we believe in
who of us have gods
who they are

Extending the experience
Instead of pushing the horizon and consuming everything and wanting more
Pushing the sky to increase subjectivity
Team cooking
Trying new flavours
Walking
Being tourists
Don't be afraid of the cliché
Let it happen
.
In Argentina there is same-sex marriage.
In Switzerland there is civil union but if you get married you can no longer adopt children.
Or you can adopt but as a single person, not a couple.
Ah, but you have a legal abortion
Here in Brazil it’s not possible, here in Argentina neither.
Women have been voting since 1971.
In Switzerland.
Switzerland does not have a president, it has a council of 7 ministers from four different parties, all of whom have to reach a consensus to make a decision.
Let's leave anthropology behind
No, we're talking about us.
.
Could Utopia be a concrete alternative to the world as it is?
Utopia is what keeps me going.
Whose Utopia is this moment?
Is it the dystopia of Capitalism?
Mistrusting the idea of the common good
How can an idea of progress include us all?
Can utopia be fascist?
What is good for one can be evil for another.
Utopia is an answer to Europe's problem
It's a European issue
a Western fiction.
An idea of a secularized Eden
a drive that makes you work-consume this world with the imagination that there could be another better place.
The possibility of redemption
.
We crossed out the word. We're Utopians. We're Non-Utopians.
And we put quotation marks around Collective.
Right.
Yes.
Good.
Let’s go on.
.
Let's imagine a big island
You are the island
you are the island
we're going to a place
inhabiting the movement
being the movement
We're going to have a positive traumatic experience
together
We're going to learn from the ancient cultures
and to unlearn everything
so we can hear
disagree
and build common areas
and organize the territory and
inhabit the silence and
eat ice cream.
Be a secret society
for picnics and bartering and imagining together and individually too.
We will be autonomous within the collective
and give a workshop or take one to decolonize the body and pay homage to the past, always entering the loop.
We will drink wine and bathe together because together we plan to hack capitalism, to respect air, fire, the pachamama and water.
We are ready to accept what is, is, and what is not, is not as Taita said and to create a parallel program to get out of the fiction, to de-hypnotize ourselves, to put ourselves in the shoes of old women, to tell the story of our village. To steal what is necessary, to free content and to recycle and create communities that will destroy the tower of Babel, communities that, like those of Tupperware are cells
who get together to do one thing
but end up making another one.
How many cells do we need to generate critical mass?
How many critical masses for a paradigm shift?
How many paradigm shifts to unplug this fridge we are living in?
.
This is a process that has to do with emotional ties.

Sometimes it moves forward
some others it stops
inflates
squirms
gets mad
is loved
We're here.

.
Anybody wants some wine?

A LIST

Collective text on the © “Colectivo” Utópico, 2019

Performative workshop, Librería Corneja, Buenos Aires, 2019.

In this 2.0 subversive reactivation of popular book clubs, “Colectivo” Utópico gathers a group of readers around texts that are too often left unread while having a strong influence on our lives. The first installment saw the participants reflect upon excerpts from Facebook’s 2018 data policy update. Not only theoretical, the workshop sets the frame for each participant to question their relationship to the private content they agree, consciously or not, to provide to the network and its partners. By bringing unrelated people together in a same space, the work invites to think of the implications and potentialities of networks, whether virtual or physical.

“Performance Telling” aims at transmitting a performance at no cost to new audiences that could not attend it or willing to experience alternative versions of it. This parasitic protocol sees each member of the Colectivo share their vision of the original material in a free format to build by juxtaposition a new common language made of their different singularities. The 60-minute result reveals and recycles an original content while questioning the possibility of communicating and understanding each other.

Building on the idea of Utopia as localized in movement itself, the artists’ proposition takes the form of a group trip to a nearby island, questioning in doing so what the word contains and the expectations it entails. Along the way, “Colectivo” Utópico opens a conversation with the travellers about human displacement and colonisation. Reversing the habitual time ratio of the journey/stay in a denunciation of consumerist tourism, the participants are invited to refocus their gaze on togetherness and their usual motivations in partaking in such an activity. Shortcuting usual social conventions, the ephemeral community is united at once by going through the same sensual positive trauma.

Island trip, ep. 2

Itinerant performative work. Tigre, Buenos Aires 2019.

School of Micro-resistance

Installative participatory work, Centro Cultural 25 de Mayo bathrooms.

Playing with the codes of transgressive writing on bathroom stall walls, the work invites the users to sketch collective responses to the system. The protection offered by the seclusion of the place and the absence of stimuli in an hyper-connected society are channeled on the white canvases. The bathrooms become a space for the exchange of materials and knowledge, a space where the public and the private overlap in an attempt to feed collective utopian resistance in everyday life. “Colectivo” Utópico adds a twist to the work by proposing to use posters instead of the genuine stall walls with school like homework instructions displayed in childish handwriting esthetics.

Book n°1