Flow embody • in site
“The ocean is in the cup…”
This performance art festival was initiated by Alastair MacLennan and Brian Paterson traveling to China visiting Shanghai, Wuhan, and Chengdu in 2023. They established different relationships with performance art organizations and brought them to Belfast in May 2024 for an 11-day program starting with performances for four days, artist talks at Ulster University and then group performances in different cities in N. Ireland.
Moving, being, and seeing in Yoko Ono’s exhibition.
As one enters a group of three wishing trees at the entrance to the exhibition “Music on my Mind” by Yoko Ono one is greeted by a phone message from Yoko herself. It is a brief message in this transitional dark space between the outside world and entering the creative space of Yoko Ono. As the title in the exhibition makes a reference to music – the curatorial tempo is carefully created as one moves from one space to the next experiencing notions of being, seeing, and connecting are equally interwoven into this special experiential exhibit if you are open to it.
TO LIVE UNEXPECTEDLY IS TO LIVE WITH NO EXPECTATIONS BUT OPENNESS; WHEN YOU MEET SUDDENLY YOU MEET YOUR SOURCE
Kineret Haya Max, an Israeli performance artist and a teacher, as a part of this year’s FLOW 2023 symposium, has created a tender, gentle space of exploration where each individual could go on an intimate journey of seeing the imposed control of the process and alchemising it through the surrender to the sudden flow; allowing one's illusions to die and resulting in recognition of the creative core-heart~ inner eye - the source of imagination.
Eleni Kolliopoulou on Daisuke Takeya
First thing that Daisuke shared with us was one of the performances he gave in his hometown in Japan in 2021. The performance was given in public space and featured himself shaving on the street at a crossing point. After a while, police came and stopped Daisuke from doing this ‘private action in the public space’. His impression was that, to his surprise, the police tried to ‘protect him’. Policemen did not mention that he might hurt the public but that he is vulnerable in the public space when doing an action that is not meant to be performed there. In his work, Daisuke inquires upon the limits of acceptable, normal and by the law in the public space. With his practice he wonders ‘how does police interact with public performances?’
“Sit comfortably in your chair”
Dr Anna Dako guides us to the actual experience of felt thinking smoothly. Availing of the virtual space that offers a degree of safety and anonymity, we are invited to take a couple of minutes to enter a more experiential connection with ourselves and other life-forms through time/ space.
In her lecture, Anna invites us to embody and contemplate all those different frequencies that we are constantly tuning to. She pays attention to simple things that are already there, but we almost constantly take them for granted, such as the earth itself.
A Cosmic Union
Jelili Atiku - artist, performer, human, the ambassador of the World and all its realms. The custodian of Outer Space and representative of Yoruba traditions. Atiku creates opportunities for the energy to flow and recognise itself through different bodies. In his performative practice, the body is a healing material that is connected to nature; it is a sacred tool. As a tool, it can share a message of mutual love, respect and support. It can heal others, so itself - through the connection with the Cosmos, so everything that surrounds us. A tool that helps one to leave the rigid identification with the mind, and it’s limitations; and through its senses to liberate and set itself free – to recognise experientially the presence of collective consciousness.
Welcome Letter 2023
We are thrilled that you have chosen to participate in the third symposium of Flow • embody in site 2023. The ethos of Flow is about creating an intimate community gathering with people tuning in online and in-person who are dedicated to public performance art practices. As we move to a hybrid format this year we are hoping to maintain the intimacy that we have created in previous years with more in-person gatherings. Flow is a space where you can connect with the world around you – be it with the natural environment or the city. World renowned performance artists lead practice-based workshops inviting you to embody the local environment where you live. What does it mean to feel connect, to unfold and be with nature and the earth we live with? How can our performance art practices be of a journey to deepen our relationship with the world around us?
“A river is a living, dynamic thing…” by Heraclitus
The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said: '“ A river is a living, dynamic thing, an architect of its surroundings. It changes all the time. That’s its beauty.” Please read this blog post to find out about the structure of Flow • embody in site 2023 symposium 2023. The Flow community that has grown out of the last two online symposiums has gathered an intimate group of artists dedicated to working in outdoor contexts. The public performances that have been created at each Flow in the practice-based workshops create giggles, inspire profundity, and create a thin space. This intimate space where participants engage in practice-based workshops that occur over several days, open community sessions and artist presentations. The currrent open call for performance lectures and artist presentations is open until April 14, 2023 and this program will happen in Week 1 & Week 2 with one online presentation each day. As a living, breathing organization that works collectively ieke Trinks and Carron Little started to brainstorm the structure for a hybrid symposium in 2021 planting the seed to build a partnership with WORM, Rotterdam.
Sophia Kidd on Paul Couillard
On Thursday, June 2, 2022, the Flow • embody in site 2022 symposium kicked off with an online lecture given by queer performance artist, curator, and scholar, Paul Couillard.
The latter two thirds of Couillard’s hour long talk, GESTURE: The materiality of animateness, was given against a virtual backdrop of a moving-slide representation of his performance art corpus. These traces of the artist’s body in past movement works were populated by the curator’s accessible and generous tone as well as scholar-speak in real-time. Host Martine Viale integrated the lecture with our own understanding, conscientiously leading into an introduction to Couillard’s multi-dimensional career, and inviting us to join in a Q & A after the lecture. We were encouraged by the artist to take advantage of any glitches in technology of his presentation to get up and stretch, move about, or make a cup of tea. This unique approach to technical difficulties was one of many gestures animating the soul and presence of Paul Couillard.
Jacq Garcia on Victoria Stanton
I have been thinking non-stop about stopping. What does it truly mean to stop and be in the present? Victoria Stanton’s “What motivates you to stop?” was a refreshing and much needed lecture to start my own process of stopping.
Victoria began to think about nothing through thinking about stillness and interstitial spaces. The in between of doing became places of something that wasn’t exactly concrete. The transitional space became a moment where time could be bent as these were considered to be temporary, however if the temporary is made longer or the moment became a focus the expectation would shift and the nothing becomes something. This rethinks what spaces are, what they can do, and what they can be.
Jennie Klein on Finale Flow Lunchtime Concert
Memories of Shelter by Yaryna Shumska was livestreamed from a suburb of Lviv, Ukraine, where she teaches in the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts (LNAA). Lviv is a city renowned for its medieval architecture and cobblestoned city center and a designated UNESCO world heritage site. Largely untouched by the fighting going on elsewhere in the Ukraine, Lviv has become a sanctuary city where Ukrainian refugees from besieged cities are welcomed. Shumska’s performance made reference to a humanitarian crisis that was not readily apparent in the quiescent streets through which she traveled.
Jacq Garcia on Carali McCall
’I miss the land, but does the land miss me?’ was lecture all about place, longing, stillness, and endurance. The lecture opened with a land acknowledgment: transmitting from Council of three fires Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi Nations also known as Chicago, Illinois there was also an acknowledgment of immigrants, migrants, black and brown ancestors as well as the extractive and colonial infrastructure of digital computations which uses electronics and servers all of which are made possible by occupying places where other beings live currently or once lived.
Jennie Klein on Dimple B Shah
During the seventies, feminist artists turned to performance art in order to make ritualistic pieces that invoked a non-patriarchal religious spirituality. At the time, invoking a mother goddess to counteract 50,000 years of patriarchal rule seemed like a radical act. Just ten years later, invoking the mother goddess and using ritual was no longer viewed as being so radical. In fact, western feminist scholars and critics, many of whom were being appointed to positions within the academy, were somewhat embarrassed by cultural feminist art, which they saw as essentially flipping the patriarchal binary hierarchy of male/culture/language vs. women/nature/the body without questioning what it meant to embrace that binary, and why it was embraced in the first place. What had previously been radical was seen as hopelessly naive, simplistic, and guilty of cultural appropriation. Thus the critic Craig Owens, in his much cited two part article “The Discourse of Others,” published in The Anti-Aesthetic (edited by Hal Foster) in 1983, did not mention any artists who were working with images of the goddess, even though artist such as Marybeth Edelson and Betsy Damon were working in New York City, where Owens was based.
Elisa Shoenberger on lo bil
The power of public performance art is the unknown encounter. It’s watching performers interact with the outside world, whether it’s the physical landscape they inhabit or their relationship to people and other animals around them. Naturally, the level of improvisation varies per performer and performance. Some are contained pieces, requiring little audience input, but not fully isolated from the world. Other pieces and performers invite participants into the performance.
Jennie Klein on Frans van Lent
Thirty years ago, Peggy Phelan published Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge), in which she argued that the power of performance as an art forms lies in its inevitable disappearance. Published in 1993 as video technology was just becoming available, Unmarked referenced a different, earlier economy of performance art, one in which description was more important than documentation, and it was often difficult to find either, since most were tucked away in limited run catalogs. Within 15 years, the iphone and the internet had changed everything. Performance art no longer disappeared. Instead, it continued to live on social media platforms, artist websites, and art publications.
The workshop Performance on the Border of Visibility, led by Frans van Lent for the 2022 Flow Festival, was about returning to the idea of the unmarked/unremarkable performance. Over two days, van Lent encouraged participants to think about making public performances that disappeared into the public space. Only the artist would know that they were performing. The public audience who encountered the piece would not be aware that anything was different, out of the ordinary, or amiss.
Elisa Shoenberger on Hector Canonge: Communicating in the Gaps
In this age of dizzyingly fast communications, we forget how mere decades ago mail was most people’s form of contact. People sent handwritten long letters or even postcards telling them about their adventures. People would have to wait days, sometimes weeks, even months for letters to arrive to learn how their loved ones were doing. There was no guarantee of a reply. This world seems ancient compared to our communications today where we can zip off an email, hop on a video call with someone across the city, the country, or the world.
Welcome to Flow 2022 by Carron Little
After the intimacy and warmth of community feeling created at last year’s online public performance symposium, we have decided to organize another. Flow • embody in site 2022 an online public performance symposium will bring practicing public performance artists together to create new work, to be in community and share work at the finale weekend of live public performances from around the globe.