Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworldinvolved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programming, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.
from “You Are (Durational Life)”. Photo by Petre Fall.
[Source: WorkspaceBrussels]
The Postspectacle Shelter was organized in a place with both artistic and political importance, the House of the People built by Ceausescu and never entirely finished (but after the Romanian revolution in 1989), whose Western wing was transformed into the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in 2004. In it, the homeless were offered food and medical assistance, and a voice in the Presidential Candidacy. The House of People was through this practical gesture given back to the People – now claustrated between the heavy brackets of double walls, that of the Parliament and of contemporary art.
The Postspectacle Shelter operated an aesthetic intervention to re-enact the crises of compassion—its internal contradiction. Postspectacle recognized that the only possible place to both stage reality and affirm the real effect of the stage where we play every day as bodies in and out of place is a No Hope shelter. A shelter which takes over a public institution by overstating its past and present failed promises of compassion and care for the people: The House of the People, now mainly housing the Romanian Parliament. The grand narrative of Romanian modernity produced this concept of a grand 'home' which was to never belong to the people, as its name so performatively promised. At the same time, the current representative democracy failed to meet the necessities of the demos; the people itself stopped believing in it. Hence, everybody invited could fearlessly play on the political stage constructed in the Shelter: by addressing the audience from the open tribune of the Presidential Candidate you became what you already were—the spectacle itself.
Freeing the homeless from 'representativity', from being caught in the rogue algorithm of compassion operates a shift in the relationship between representation and injustice. There is no sure 'home' for the spectator and the performer. The audience is as fragile as the performing bodies. The assigned roles inside the spectacle are in themselves precarious, unstable, oscillatory. The partial-spectator becomes the partial-performer and vice versa. There is no pure audience. Like in the performance of compassion, mere spectatorship generates the illusion of agency, but there is first and foremost the illusion of spectatorship that shadows any oscillation between comforting agency and the much-feared passivity. The stakes are not about seeing a spectacle, but about sensing the movement, the uncertainty of every moment, the fragility of borders and of the possible outcomes.
- Alina Popa, “The Crises of (Com)Passion and the Corrupt Audience”
If you are lucky to have escaped a disease conventionally you can go back to the radicality of thought as if nothing happened. Some may experience a new surge of life. Almost everyone wants to change, especially if the threat is big enough. When my existence has been put at risk thought felt deeply humiliated, it stopped. For days I have been just feeling that I exist and that is my protection like a lucid breath inhaled and exhaled by heart.
- Alina Popa, “Disease as an Aesthetic Project”
“I am preoccupied with developing performative practices, both somatic and discursive, that give form to the invisible, that give gravity to the immaterial.”
- “Art After Cantemir” (one of her most stellar texts, in dialogue with Dimitrie Cantemir and black on black)
Partysophy/Philoparty at Brut Theater, Vienna, 2015 photo: Pepa Ubera
“Partysophy/Philoparty comes out of a sustained practice of giving "staged" lectures, which are in themselves only modes of organization of social space – different from those enforced by the standard staging of thinking. This one is a lecture that needs a different kind of preparation, besides reading books or hierarchizing information: meditating, dancing absentmindedly, structuring your daily moods or going shopping with your urgent questions in the basket. Partysophy/Philoparty is a performance set up as spatiotemporal confusion. Bracketed between crowd pleasing DJ sets, it is the staging of a lecture built on the fine border between sophism as "the performance of intelligence" and the intelligence of performance, between wisdom and imitation of wisdom. The performer, be it in the guise of a DJ or in the guise of a "philosopher", is a space-organizer employing technologies for the formalization of diffferent, even antagonistic, community structures. Rhythm is the carrier of social space. The aestheticization of a lecture's rhythm has mainly come to emphasize the hierarchical mode of the "one preaching to the many", even if the message carried by its symbolic content turns against this hierarchy. On the other hand, being slave to the rhythm of a DJ's song opens up a more liberal space, yet one haunted by the totalitarianism of the spectacle. Partysophy/philoparty is affirming both party loving as a more truthful way of being together, and party spoiling, as a necessary distance from the spectacle of entertainment, in itself formalized, much like the aesthetics of wisdom in contemporary academia. The decisive moments are not the party or the lecture in itself but the ambiguous spatiotemporality at the beginning and end, when the space is in process of being restructured from party to lecture, from lecture to party. Applause fades into pop rhythms before it even starts, the content is forgotten having fun.”
