During our sixth week of residency we found ourselves locked in four walls building the context and format of our FOOD FOR THOUGHTS dinner event at the 555 gallery.
Avoiding being explicit and trying to evoke a certain sub-text to our talks and narrations we made a clear distinction between "doing" and "acting".
Doing involves a practice of being part of everyday narratives, introducing dialectics within these narratives and eventually have a reflective approach towards them. Our doing bears within the awareness of the capillary waves it creates and our need to gain control over them, for the benefit of maintaining our initial ethics towards a community that has placed trust on our temporal existence in Detroit.
Acting refers to a practice of those who don't vanish. It is a practice we have chosen not to engage ourselves to, due to the temporal nature of our stay. Acting is the outcome of an equation of adding diverse practices/strategies that complement each other under a common aim - that of "re- building" Detroit.
Our doing attempts among other things to function as a catalyst, as a mediated force to communicate those practices to those involved in the acting.
We have put our trust on poetics to give a format to our discussions and construct a deeper layer to our story-sharing.
The poetics failed us creating merely repetition, suspicion and miscommunication of our intentions.
We therefore need to rethink on how we construct a reflective social event in relation to the Detroit context. I am not saying that we necessarily have to be explicit, but nevertheless bring the sub-text to the surface.
Our doing here is a learning process, not predefined and certainly not easy.
As Drew successfully pointed out there are two types of temporal inhabitants in the city of Detroit - those with a mission and those with a need to experience/search and therefore work towards a fruitful input. We do feel we fit to the description of the latter rather than the former.
Anyone objected to that please feel free to comment.
Okay, i feel free to comment (as you might have expected....).
ReplyDeletethere is a difficulty in this opposition of the ones with a mission, and the ones on a 'quest' for input. I don't think that there is merely a thin line between those two. rather, the space between the mission and the quest is big, mostly unexplored and grey. that's probably where the thoughts, doubts and awareness you guys have about belonging <--> not belonging/ outsider <--> participant come from. But the first doesn't nessecarily exclude the second. In your case, in which you yourselves clearly state that your aim is to be a catalyst, there is a sort of purpose in your quest, that is -hopefully- fruitfull to the mission.
To summarize: the one feeds the other, and vice versa.
So where do you think you fit in now, ha???