A thought, a body and a broadcast, each refusing to behave as expected. Andrei Bessa , Nuka Horvat and Somer Şpat showed us that disobedience doesn’t have one format.
On 26 September, we at Fossil Free Culture NL joined Home of Participation to celebrate three artists and three months of residency. Workshopping, Performing, Listening: Reassign Disobedience took over the OT301 building, from 4bid Gallery up to the third floor, and we are still buzzing.
In bear.ing, Andrei Bessa filled the gallery with blue light, a horn, a body and projected words: “to unfit.” We couldn’t look away.
“Once, in the future, a body became a bear. Or perhaps it was already carrying one.
bear.ing is a speculative installation where a mythology takes shape from a large, fat body: part bear, part unicorn, part archive, part becoming.
The work begins with bear: to carry, to endure, to give birth, to be a bear. What if not fitting is not a failure, but a form of world-making? What if there is already more than one body inside a body?
Somewhere between archive and prophecy, bear.ing becomes a site of birth: where a creature, a body, a language and a mythology are carried into being.
bear me, bear with me.”
Somer Şpat broadcast the building to itself. Through Piskalama, his publishing and broadcasting platform, he gathered the sounds of OT301 through the staircase while the gallery listened live. The whole building became a field of movement, happenings and interruptions: we were hearing the place we were standing in, as it happened.
And it all began around a table full of paint, scissors and prompt cards, in Nuka Horvat’s zine workshop Disobedience = Creativity: a thought as a poem, a manifesto, a drawing.
What can disobedience teach us about creativity?
Together, we’ll reflect on our positions in society and explore creativity as a tool for imagining and building different ways of living. We’ll play with forms and ideas of civil and social disobedience as creative practice, experimenting with zines, poetry, diary entries, drawings, questions and other forms of expression.
None of it could be known in advance. In Somer’s words: the conditions were prepared, the outcome was not. At our Disobedient Art School we call that rehearsal instead of certainty, and that is what this evening was: three rehearsals for other ways of being, making and listening.
We closed the night with a conversation between the three residents, and left full of ideas.
Thank you, Andrei, Nuka and Somer, for your generosity and your nerve.
And thank you to everyone who came, moved in and out, stayed to talk, and ate and drank with us at HoP. This is the kind of community we want to keep building.
Disclaimer: This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.