La Pocha Nostra e VestandPage

Performance art a Forte Marghera: martedì 6 giugno la restituzione pubblica del workshop de La Pocha Nostra e VestandPage

Il giorno 6 giugno 2017 (dalle ore 18:00), all'interno del capannone 30 nel Parco del Contemporaneo di Forte Marghera, Mestre (VE), l'Educational Learning Program della Venice International Performance Art Week, in collaborazione con l’associazione Live Arts Cultures, presenta a la performance conclusiva del progetto “Joint Performance Summer Class”, dieci giorni di formazione e sperimentazione con La Pocha Nostra e VestAndPage.

La Pocha Nostra e VestAndPage sono stati invitati dalla curatrice indipendente Francesca Carol Rolla ad unire le loro rispettive metodologie e guidare un gruppo selezionato di artisti, per aiutarli a sviluppare e potenziare la loro pratica artistica, in nome di una comunità temporanea transnazionale, orizzontale, solidale e responsabile, quasi utopica all'interno di uno scenario globale dove i diversi sistemi economico-sociali muovono per lo più verso relazioni di capitale.

25 artisti locali e internazionali provenienti da 13 differenti paesi (Cina, Stati Uniti, Grecia, Regno Unito, Italia, Austria, Polonia, Brasile, Germania, Sri Lanka, Canada, Paesi Bassi e Serbia) performeranno dunque in una “jam session” di immagini e live art, sotto la guida di VestAndPage e La Pocha Nostra. 

Momento conclusivo di questo progetto educativo, la performance art qui emerge come uno spazio critico e sperimentale di negoziazione delle differenti identità culturali, nazionali, generazionali, di genere ed etniche, individuali e collettive.

Di seguito la lettera di motivazioni dal curatore Francesca Carol Rolla a La Pocha Nostra e VestAndPage

From my experience with La Pocha Nostra and VestAndPage in December 2014,
during the II VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK, “Ritual Body – Political Body”;
And on the reasons that motivated me to suggest a parallel formative workshop experience with La Pocha Nostra and VestAndPage, again together, in Venice, 2017:

In our world’s stage, where economic and social system move deeply into relations of capital, La Pocha Nostra and VestAndPage generous theory and practice stress the complexity of being human – the pleasures and the pains.

Passing through your artistic practices and works, having had myself the chance to work and share with you your non-hierarchical horizontal methodology and inspiring must readings (from VestAndPage’s catalogs of the first two editions of the Venice International Performance Art Week and Andrea Pagnes, The Fall of Faust. Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action, to La Pocha Nostra’s Exercises for Rebel Artists. Radical Performance Pedagogy and Guillermo Gomez Pena’s Conversation Across Borders: A Performance Artist Converses with Theorists, Curators, Activists and Fellow Artists), in my perspective you embody the potential surplus (George Bataille), offered to individuals and at disposal of a diversified and inclusive community – cause of agitation, critical energy and commitment.

You give and provoke.
You call us to listen and improve, to be rebels and contribute to betterment.
With both of you, I saw the audience singularly engaged. There, you were giving voice and shape to generative resources, calling for lost ideals and new imaginary realities.

Your territory seems to be the one where structural and intimate changes occur while witnessing your archetypal images and actions. I can tell that you are able to produce bonds:
The signs of your body and your material and virtual presence address the personal, the unspoken and the unseen. I know you trust the unknowable.

Calling at stake the entirety of space – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and political – a reality across boundaries of difference, race, culture and gender is here presented.
You cross boundaries of privilege.

You embody the necessary and troubling questions:
why are you here?  who are you?
what is our potential when we finally are together?
can I say that my hope is located in your arms?

You make us recognizing that our body can be our first poetic materia prima –
unpredictable kaleidoscopic mirror, through which we are called to critically and radically confront ourselves, entities in constant evolution and transformation.

As La Pocha Nostra ritualizes the body through a shared bank of implicit and explicit costumes, masks, meat and disguises, reconfiguring our poetic colonized cartography – temporary space for utopian possibilities – the potential of that continuous change is of the same substance that I recognize in VestAndPage capability to lead their temporary community to a more profound consideration about what is destiny in our time, […] beyond what is enrooted into the collective imaginary, by bringing back to simplicity what our deceptive mind sees as hybrid, synthetic, troubled, diverse, different.

Before knowing you I was wondering what motivates artists to give, to share initiatory processes. To me, you have been the experience that embodies what art can do: assigning sacred tasks to the human imaginary, you showed me that I might be able to live my life as a work of art.
I understand that efforts are required, as well as sacrifice – but everybody has his part on the stage.

The liminal space you open and inhabit is to me the heritage of our noble identity obligations. This is why I deeply hoped to have you back together in Venice once again: the world needs it, now more than ever.

FCR
Formentera, Spain. April, 2017