modern people
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with;
it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
Donna Haraway
Once the centrality of anthropos is challenged, a number of boundaries
between ‘Man’ and his others go tumbling down, in a cascade effect that
opens up unexpected perspectives.
Rosi Braidotti
Modern People is a site-specific performance series based on hand-operated algorithms and an attempt to analyse society as an organism. Its focus lies on material excretions and waste, which are treated as indicators of the health and condition of the social body—a process comparable to a coprological examination.
We embark on a search for physical and intellectual spaces. In a playful process, we place freely accessible material and immaterial resources into new social relationships, making them accessible through sensory experience.
Performative strategies for a regenerative, symbiotic society—playing as a tool for creating spaces of possibility
Someone’s dumped toaster, fixed with an elsewhere disposed coffee machine’s cord, works well as an electric thurible to vaporise resin crumbs from the old hurt spruce tree that lives next to the supermarket. After its long journey, the lost bolt of a truck’s coupling can tell us many great stories and is happy to be asked to dance. The broken off rubber seal is a dangerous snake we gently move out of our way. In case we get hurt or feel sick, we picked some dewberries for rescue. The broken TV screen needs a massage. The lost pretzel must be raised as a bread flag.
Our approach is based on a physical and material-aesthetic examination of the world that surrounds us, that we shape and leave behind. Playing becomes a key to observation, while allowing empathy towards objects. It allows and requires a level of attention that is often undesirable in our everyday lives. As an exercise in reflecting on potential realities, play might be a forgotten key to social transformation.
Open, Mindful, Permeable—Radical Tenderness
The project encompasses an attempt to raise awareness of our immense consumption of resources in the context of global distribution and fair, sustainable, and humane coexistence, including other life forms and ecosystems on planet Earth. The foundation of the performance is formed by: collecting as an instinctive human trait, the experimental examination of unused, invisible resources that are discarded by a careless society, and the temporary reinterpretation and appropriation of public spaces and their architectures, in order to open up new paths within existing structures.
The performance series is not only about the process of finding and the potential of freely available resources. It is also about allowing a permeable state in which objects and connections reveal themselves and thus become perceptible. For the performers, it is a kind of mindfulness training in the perception of feelings; looking at that which we have learned to look away from, both internally and externally, in order to be able to encounter, with tenderness, discarded, lost, forgotten, useless and fallen things. For the audience, it becomes an exercise in deciphering these gestures of radical tenderness toward everything that is.
How we get started
We will do a thorough on-side visit to define the exact place (can be indoors or outdoors) for the performance together with the curatorial- or gallery team, and fix the performance dates.
We start to do walks, explore architecture, niches and corners, deserted sidewalks and passages.
We then start to collect all kinds of objects that are intentionally disposed of, lying around, lost, broken or fallen off. Objects that we would not normally pay attention to.
Bring the objects to our temporary storage space.
We meet at the spots we discovered and start playing with the objects we found. We ask questions like: What could it be used for? How can we dance with it? Does it speak to another object? Does it speak to the surroundings? How can we combine two objects or more? How does it feel to pet the architecture/ the plant/ the rock?
We develop 10 to 20 action scores using all of our senses and collective imagination. For example: „Push the potato–shaped rock and follow its path.“ or „cut small Y-shaped twigs from a bigger branch”, or „sit with the broken dishwasher and listen to the wind“ etc.
By using symbols, drawn on leaves, stones, litter etc. (depending on our findings), we are physically coding a program that allows us to organize the actions we perform in an unpredictable order.
Hollow Ground
Text by Gudrun Ratzinger & Franz Thalmair
One can describe Elke Auer¹ and Daniel Hafner's performance Moder People as algorithmic improvisation: a form of improvisation in which body movements, glances and gestures, and the interaction with the material setting are performed in real time but, at the same time, governed by an algorithm—a system of rules and instructions —conceived by the artists. "The constant evaluation of the process during the process is both an intrinsic part and the driving force thereof," writes philosopher Alessandro Bertinetto on the quirk of improvising when dealing with unforeseen situations and with reference to the field of artistic research: "Improvisers are at once actors and witnesses to their own acts."² The departure point for Moder People is a pursuit of the discarded, disposed, and lost, as well as the encounter with objects that bear traits of these moments of "waste." In this case, the witnesses are not only the two improvisers themselves but also the audience who can engage in a sensual-playful process.
Be it garbage intentionally or unintentionally left on the roadside, construction debris, bones of dead animals, odd-shaped stones, branches, or seeds: everyday fragments, things that speak of human, animal, or plant existence, serve Auer and Hafner as objects for improvisation. As the performance evolves at Kunstraum Lakeside, found objects accumulate; they are further processed and evaluated live on site, utilized by the artists to reflect on the current state of our world through the characteristics and potentials of its available resources. The modes of interaction with the objects range from elementary activities and everyday routines to experimental learning, the development of social structures, language, or dance movements. "The intention of the project is not to propose certain utopian models," states the artist duo about Modem People, "rather, it is an attempt to devise a setup that encompasses plural realms of life and questions about the future but does not derive its answers from conventional explanatory techniques." The actions performed by Auer and Hafner before the audience alternate at irregular intervals. Even if they do not follow any comprehensible logic, they seem systematic. The cycle of action and reaction aims to access a space, a space of thought, in which learned values, behavioral patterns, and the associated norms can be called into question.
¹ Elke Auer (b. 1980 in Austria) lives and works in Vienna.
² Alessandro Bertinetto, "Improvisieren," in Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch, eds. Jens Badura et al. (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015), 147-150, here: 148. Translated for this publication.