Making Our Own Monsters with Alica Minar & Col.
Together we imagined ourselves as Monsters, as entities going beyond the normativity, finding our own ways based on shared values, joy and dreams. Later it led us to understand collective work as mycelium, where the individual becomes many and vice versa while trying to listen to the intuition as a hypha.
I met the dance company Alica Minar & col. On the 18th of August in Berlin to facilitate a tarot reading session on better understanding both the individual and collective aims of/within the company. The tarot deck once again proved to be a perfect tool not only to reflect on one’s processes but maybe even more as a tool for designing the visions, acknowledging the needs and exploring the potential of one’s work.
Together we imagined ourselves as Monsters, as entities going beyond the normativity, finding our own ways based on shared values, joy and dreams. Later it led us to understand collective work as mycelium, where the individual becomes many and vice versa while trying to listen to the intuition as a hypha. We ended up summarizing the newly discovered needs and identified structures we want to be part of as well as identify those which we wanted to abolish, or at least overcome.
When Federico Campagna talks about escaping and/or destroying the blind, one-ways in current discourses, he proposes not to engage with them dialectically but rather to substitute them with new narratives. This is where we got at the end of the reading when I provoked the collective with a ritual to making our own Monster with a network of individual memories, knowledge, experience, emotions.
The ritual goes like this:
Make Your Shared Monster
Remediate your collective practice, discussions, time spent together and individual thoughts into a collective, shared monster. Give it a simple shape (a large, easy to fold paper) that you can easily mail to each other when you are apart.
Work on the monster slowly, gradually packing in their shape (like a collage): work individually when the monster is with you. Pack in the other parts at the moment you determine is appropriate (after the end of the process, after intense work, when something hurts/comforts you, when you think of others). Then send it on.
The moment you come together physically or when you set a time for reflection together. Take the monster amongst you. Let them talk.
With Alica Minar & col. we promised to meet several times during the next year to observe how the monster is growing and what we can learn from it*them.
Participants: Alica Minar, Katarina Bakošová, Lenka Vořechovská
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