‘Critical Encounters’

Image (c) Writing Encounters

Open Dialogues defines critical writing as an intellectual encounter between writing and art in which there is an agency, contingency or something at stake. It is writing on art, for art, about and as art. We also work on the premise that artists and people who write about art belong to the same social and professional networks, share the same interests and have common goals.


THE NEW LIFE BERLIN FESTIVAL

The New Life Berlin festival took place over two and a half weeks in June 2008. The festival was curated from submissions received online via Wooloo.org, the organisers’ website-come-social networking site for artists, and included 15 international participatory projects, all of which employed collaboration and performance that, in their words, aimed to ‘examine notions of artistic responsibility and enact new modes of existing within artistic communities.’

The projects varied widely in the ways they put collaboration and performance to use. ‘Fictive Days’, by Sergio Zevallos, brought together twelve strangers to live as their favourite fictional film characters, inside a Berlin apartment for 24 hours a day, for two weeks. ‘Eat the Wall’ by Ali&cia, invited the residents of Berlin to build a version of the Berlin wall out of food and then eat it together. ‘Flash Job Campaign’, led by Per Transdaal, asked artists to negotiate employment deals between Germans and youths from the Turkish immigrant community in a rundown part of Berlin. And the ‘Powell Opera for Non-Musicians’ choreographed non musician festival participants inside part of an operatic cycle by composer Franck Leibovici.

All the work in New Life Berlin shared a focus on the process of participation rather than an artistic product. The festival’s interrogation of ‘artistic responsibility and new modes of artistic being’ was located in the sustained and durational encounter between artists and participants throughout the festival, and not simply public performances or ‘end product’. Instead of audience members or viewers, New Life Berlin had co-producers, or co-conspirators, who could interact with the artwork and even change its course. The New Life Berlin artists also shared communal and semi-public living areas. In short, the process of artistic production was the artistic product in New Life Berlin.

OPEN DIALOGUES: NEW LIFE BERLIN

Within this environment Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin set out to explore what critical writing could be. We instigated a practical project that would put pressure on the encounter between writing and participatory art. We had only one certainty in mind. If the meaning of the work in New Life Berlin was produced in process and encounter, then our examination of critical writing would have to focus on the act of critical writing itself, and its encounter with art. We could not prescribe what would happen, only invite other writers to experiment in writing alongside us. And so in June, Open Dialogues travelled to Berlin to work with twenty writers, curators and artists from across the world, none of whom we had met before.

Once in Berlin, we formed Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin: a writing community at the heart of the festival. Our project ran alongside the other performances – as an artistic experiment that invited collaboration. It also ran into the other performances – we writers participated in their work- whilst writing responses from it.

Our role as writers in the festival was complex. We were both participating in New Life Berlin, and writing from the festival. We were examining the act of writing in and by ‘doing’ writing. We were aware of the paradoxes in our situation; that we were exploring collaboratively the usually quite isolated and singular act of writing. And that we were the only people in the festival producing a product from and about artistic process – stand alone texts that were available during and after the festival.

THE OPEN DIALOGUES MODEL

We did not ignore these paradoxes. Instead, we took them as central to our experiment; we used our embedded position within the festival to put the agency of critical writing to the test. We openly and actively got involved in the process, the relationships of this participatory art. We worked with the festival organisers, the artists and their work, and the participants; we openly acknowledged and inhabited the closeness of thee relationships – be they personal, professional, economic- that feed into critical writing; relationships that always exist, but often remain hidden in writing. In short, the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin methodology for locating ‘the critical’ in the encounter between critical writing and participatory art was both in and by our embeddedness in the process of participation.

We began choreographing our encounters well before the festival began. We started talking to artists, and highlighting our embedded approach. We worked with the artists to explore meaning as a form of collaboration. We built a structure for debate and dialogue that operated both in our act of coming to the writing and our writing itself-structures that attempted to make our writing more porous, to the work at the festival, to the artists. We held a ‘Live Review’ in the middle of the festival, a public debate where we turned the critical attention onto ourselves as writers. We held workshops, debates and discussions on writing from live and participatory art, how to get closely involved with the work, how to co-ordinate our encounters and how to locate criticality within our relationships with the art and artists in New Life Berlin. Then, we went out and tried to ‘do’ it.......

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NOTES FOR THE FUTURE

Our experiment at New Life Berlin raised intriguing questions concerning collaboration as meaning, the porosity of writing, illegitimacy of voice and the proximity of a writer to her subject and object. It also left more questions concerning the location and agency of critical writing.

Ultimately, we were happy not to arrive at a resolution to these questions. The methodology of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin was to fully expose, and so put pressure on, the existing patterns and power relations in the act critical writing in order to locate the possibility for something to shift.

We felt sure that in our focus of what lies off the page in the act of critical writing, we had created something different, or at the very least that we had inhabited the conditions of the same and poked around inside. But our encounters, methodology and results were not empirical, qualitative or certain. We could not predict outcomes, and nor could we look for results.

Instead, in focussing on the act of critical writing, the work of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin is located off the page or outside the frame of the writing itself. The point of the experiment was to remain open to experiment. The writing itself marks only the beginning of an investigation. What happens next is up to the writers and artists that were part of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. Our thanks to them, and the other New Life Berliners.


Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson

Copyright Open Dialogues

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‘Critical Encounters’ was a paper delivered by Open Dialogues at the Writing Encounters Symposium, York St John University 11-13 September 2008. It used our recent participatory writing project in Berlin ‘Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin’ as case study with which to explore what happens when critical writing comes together with live, time based and participatory art.

This text is a short excerpt of that symposium paper; it leaves a lot of our research concerns and conclusions off the page. But it nevertheless demonstrates our thinking so far.

The Writing Encounters symposium was curated by Claire Hind and Claire MacDonald; it was multidisciplinary and international in its focus, and for writing artists, researchers, curators, producers and teachers who have an interest in the encounter between art, writing and performance.

More about Writing Encounters here.