Spectacle Conference Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel. Casa Daros, December 2014. Photo: Jessica Gogan

House 6 – Languages

Raphael Giammattey

In terms of language, what did the Contemporary Laboratory bring to the table? Was it a proposal of education, experimentation, collectivity and interactivity? Or was it just a motivation so young artists would take the chance of creating in a different language, using techniques they had never used before?

The multiple forms of knowledge brought together by the variety of artists of diverse languages doesn’t explain what happened. It wouldn’t be fruitful to talk about the idea of performance created simultaneously by a poet, a musician and a dancer. The junction of languages doesn’t correspond to the organicity of the artists of each genre. Something happens when we don’t arrange the variety of knowledge in the same place. We expect something from them, and that something isn’t necessarily “artisticness.” For example, if I expect to have a dancer among the actors, I will expect his evaluations concerning the movements of everyone; or if I expect a musician to compose a soundtrack, I will expect he organizes our experiences via sound.

The conclusion we reach is that we know what to expect and to demand from an artist when we delimit his genre. Therefore, effectively, there’s no artistic exchange. However, when two artists talk freely, what happens? Do their languages blur or do they talk about themselves and their techniques? How would they plan an artwork signed by both without giving extra importance to one of the names in the signature? How could an artwork be explained without a clear authorship? And if we take this question to the spectacle conference, how could 17 artists talk about what happened to them if what happened to them didn’t happen exclusively to just one of them?