MEANINGS AND ACTIONS

During this 20-hour workshop, CA2M keeps on its line of work focusing on education and reflection regarding the educative uses of bodywork and  performance language. Guided by Norberto Llopis, we will reflect on education and art as political practices, intending to trigger new impulses and searches for new forms of imagination not under control yet. The practice will revolve around some concepts: the concept of performative act, the concept of affection and the power one.

 “Performative” act

In practamatic, the philosopher J.L. Austin explains that language is not pure, a mere instrument of symbolic communication used to transfer meanings, therefore, language can be also studied at a “performative” level, being usually an example of act of promising. Promising, not in the sense of a communication of a subjective intension of performing what it is promised, promising is an act in itself, independent even from what it was promised to finally be performed.

This practice invites us to focus on the performative aspect of our proposals. What are we doing?, What does what we are doing?, of course, I would not want falling into dogmatism, since meanings also “perform”.

Affect and power

“By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections…”

Barush Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order

Much has been said about affection, but it has not always been considered, as the aforesaid, the power or the possibility that this affect aids or restrains. Putting aside the dimension of power (in a broad sense, as restrained power as enabling, discrediting, impellenting), to some extent, the action of work is denied, limiting affections towards contemplative windows where the action goes no further than their contemplative frame.

What does it give? What does it take? What can it get? What does it want? What does it do? No place for innocence, the intensity of affection doesn´t give a certificate of innocence, like it would be like saying “this affection does not affect”. Willing to generate a discussion environment during this workshop, do not take for granted or dogmatize the concepts we start from.

Instruments

By applying different exercises and instruments to analyze and to approach to our practice by means of affection, action and power, as well as to elude mere discursive or narrative dramas: use of maps as a means to apply strategies to affect in a way to restrain other ways; use of objects as a means of materializing or objecting affects, the affects as that simulation that objects perform: and the use or creation of dictionaries that help us to understand the extension of the affects to work with.