Breaking the Spell. Feminist artistic practices of being-with
"Breaking the Spell" is a pilot step of an artistic research project that reflects practices of thinkingand being-with in performing arts. It is a temporary space of common learning and mutual support for artists, curators and thinkers who redefine the arts by deeply transforming the ways of cocreating, producing and sharing it. It focuses on artistic practices which are deeply political and poetic at the same time and which refuse to follow the dominating, exhausting modes of working and producing. Observing how they are situated in the local environments, it searches for ways to build and maintain transnational alliances.“ Breaking the Spell” emerges from the desire to understand how to make art in the moment of loosing the world as we knew it.
Its idea took shape during the rather bleak weeks of autumn 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, when the limits of social distance in Poland were broken by mass protests (the largest since 1989) against the almost total ban on abortion. Despite all the efforts, the new law on abortion was introduced, and turned out to be yet another element in the series of humiliations against female, feminised and queer bodies that we had been experiencing here recently. We have lost this particular fight, but we leave from it stronger, empowered by recognition of being many.
And even if, obviously, the current backlash is not specific to any particular country, the Breaking the Spell initial concept is indeed deeply situated in the Eastern European context, in its geopolitical position of semi-peripheral country which spent last thirty years in ceaseless run after the West, and which had to endlessly prove it was good enough to be considered European. The project idea stems from the moment of exhaustion and asks: how to keep going when the local ground actively repulses you? How to sustain your practice in the locality which becomes hostile? How not to let yourself burnout before you even noticed? Arising from the local context, the Breaking the Spell idea emerges from a genuine need of strengthening each other and looking for translocal and transnational alliances.
Borrowing its title from the book by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, the project questions the sorcery without sorcerers1, a capitalist, patriarchal realism, so overwhelmingly dominant and so deeply intertwined with our subjectivities that often any alternative seems unthinkable. The artists and thinkers invited to join the BTS trajectory challenge this domination profoundly: through the artistic research they undertake and through the modes of production they choose. They re-enchant the performing arts world by opening conditions for long-term, intimate encounters with their human and non-human interlocutors. They take a feminist perspective as a very logic of work and 1
Philippe Pignarre, Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery. Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey, Palgrave Macmillian 2011, p. 135