luck test: 2008

15 August, 2008

10 July, 2008

ON LINE

"Between the months of October 2006 and October 2007, I've carried out 8 workshops in 8 different cities (Caldas da Rainha, Torres Vedras, Porto, Lisbon, Braga and Almada, in Portugal; Hamburg and Berlin, in Germany). These workshops were based on some concepts, practically and theoretically developed at the heart of the project "Vou A Tua Casa"; a theatrical trilogy I've been creating and presenting since 2003 in many European cities. Some other parallel projects to "Vou A Tua Casa" were also starting points for the workshops, namely "FUI" (2005/2006) and "Documentation Project" (2006/2007). However, the basic tool was the document "Dogma 2005", a text that compiles, in an inflexible and indisputable set of rules, the theoretical advancements of the projects listed above, dealing with issues such as authorship, artistic freedom or binomial form/content. From the almost 70 artists and non-artists that participated, I selected 11 to follow on the projects they created during the workshop, even though they would now have to more fiercely respect the rules imposed by "Dogma". This group of selected participants are called "opportune spectators". I then added another group, made out of "thinkers/observers", coming from different contemporary arts and culture fields, and also a "youngest" group of future art critics and theoreticians, called "The Hopeful Selection". In the end, the whole project will be accompanied by a series of terrorist street actions, some clandestine viral videos with socked-head and distorted voices characters, a documentary, a book, some secret conversations, an arts exhibition and a totalitarian music DJ set. Everything disconnected. Everything unwrapped. Therefore, "The Spectator's Opportunity" will be about artistic freedom, artistic slavery, artistic corruption, the imposition of new models, the ethics of the observer, the importance of MSN Messenger and blogger.com for contemporary arts practice, and the birth of a brand new nominalist sect (already earning its tithe...), which is nothing more than a revived Modernism with a post-modern taste in its accent and its rhetorics. 'Down with the anachronistic attempt to surpass the contemporaneity crisis!', says "Dogma". 'Power to the people!', I say."

Rogério Nuno Costa