“Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” (Van Dooren, flight ways, 60) ( Donna Harraway, Staying with the trouble).
Re-imagining being here the project wants to question which place a human on earth should take among all living and non living beings and how to be here as mortal critters; microbes, plants, animals, humans, and non humans, sometimes even machines, entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.
“Think we must. We must think.” — Strengers and Despret, Woman Who Make a Fuss.
Inspired by Donna Harraway’s Staying with the trouble. This project aims to collectively stay with the trouble. To stir up potent responses to devestating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. To collect an ecology of practises in order to configure respose- ability. Intending to be truly present not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts or apocalyptic salfic futures.
“it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas. It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledge know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.” — Strathern , Reproducing the Future
For this project i call upon the “female night being” my demon/daimon Lilith the spider also described as “lady air” or godess of the south wind and moon. In Jewish folklore from c. 700 – 1000 CE onwards, she appears as Adam’s first wife. Lilith left Adam after she refused to become subservient to him. In modern times she was positively regarded as a free-spirited woman in feminist circles. Lilith comes from the chtonic – the underworld and currently lives in an olive tree garden near where i live in a greenhouse in Hever, Belgium. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intruiging travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots, and routes. In order to keep track of her time and space travels she draws up a map leaving, signs, traces in order to store the gathered information. This map will also guide the experiment in the proces of further story- telling, remembering, predicting, visualising, determening, understanding, fictionalising and eventually weaving possible futures.
Familiar in her task Lilith is creating an intruiging web, a rhizome. Doing so by curating her own experimental ecosystem in which different experiments, meetings and collaborations between different people and from different disciplines and angels are made possible.
She can trick you, challenge you, she might complicate things and stir up trouble. Emancipating the audience, challenging her collaborators she inspires them to dream with, think with and feel with.
Creating her web she embraces her tentacular way of working and thinking, i remember tentacular comes from the latin tentaculum meaning “feeler”, and tentare, meaning “ to feel” and “to try”; and i know that my leggy spider has many armed allies.
Applying sympoeisis inspired “by M Beth Dempster’s master of invironemental studies thesis written in 1998, in which she suggested the term sympoeisis for “collectively- producing systems that do not have self- defined spatial and temporal boundries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionairy and have the potential for surprising change”. Further more she lays trust in the challenge of working with an active/emancipated audience, equal companions and trust in “creative uncertainty”.
Generating collective works by entangling, complicating, questioning, layering, tracking and sorting information. Therefore challenging our bordered individualism and human exceptionalist ways of thinking.
This approach enables us to look through different lenzes, vieuwpoints, and move through different worlds. Futhermore we create new entrances, recycle ideas, scores and materials.
Over the course of two years through the different encournters Lilith aims to generate as much as possible in and output, sharing these in a collective data base, through performance, lecture, exposition, dance, open atelier, choreographed events and maybe even an illustrated childrens book,..
My interest so far lay in the respected fields of ecofeminism, ecosex, anthropology, storytelling, queer, data science, antropology, theology, matriarchy, biology, science, biomimicry, history, permaculture, ontology of dance ( tarantella), dance as virus, female art, pop-culture, interpersonal relations, psychology, myth, embodyment, handwork, politics, …
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VOL 1. Meeting between visual freak Aitor Biedma and Lilith the spider.
We create a common vision questioning which place a human on earth should take among all living and non living beings and how to be here as mortal critters; microbes plants, animals, humans, and non humans, sometimes even machines, entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.
Credits
Performance: Laura Eva Meuris with Aitor Biedma
Dramaturgical assistance: Zuzana Zabkova
Sound: Pictureplane, Aitor Biedma, Laura Eva Meuris
Video: Zoilly Productions
@Predikheren stadsbibliotheek Mechelen
Supported by Koen kwanten ( Artenova), Jasmien Ceulemans (Stad Mechelen), The greenhouse Hever
Special thanks to: The New Dionysian Festival, Creepy Teepee Festival, Bianka Fontaine, esha_clothing, Wim Hendrickx, the collaborators, friends and family who co-created, supported and inspired this work.
