Invisible, she floats in the presence of the tide. The work explores the construction of possible temporary spaces and thresholds between realities produced within these spaces. Tensions between distance and proximity, modes of presence, reality and virtuality, aspects of limits between life and death, sex and violence, pleasure and suffering are ambiguities that inhabit and contour this work.

seep’s rhythm is an ever-evolving, self-nurturing complex, a continuous re-organisation of care. It’s located in the space between almost touching while being almost separated. What seeps through this configuration are dirty, cryptic, chromosonic traces of the longed-for possibility to communicate.

There are definitely connections between the two final works, since the whole process was developed collectively by all participants. In both works are aspects of passage, connection/non-connection, and thresholds. All these characteristics were strongly lived experiences, not only within the group, but also by many people around the world, due to the socio-political moment generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. We worked through modes of obstructed breathing and respiration, its rhythms and cycles as a basis of life and death, communication and relationships. Further on, both works use alternative ways of verbal language. We examined modes of speech and communication, opening spaces of poetic, code-based language and somatic dialogues. The material (plastic in various forms) became a carrier of meaning: it connects, separates, obstructs, protects. Visible, not immediately visible, opaque – plastic became a third body which interacted with the artists. All three bodies relate to each and each other: they improvise together.

Perhaps, Conditions of a Necessity could be a basic name for any work developed in a collective way. Although the name came up in more direct relation to the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, it also refers to the dynamics of any group or social relationship. Each situation is a situation with different conditions and needs that reflect aspects of the moment being lived. The themes presented were also divided by the dynamics emerging within the group, as half of the students were new to the program and the other half had already worked together or had some kind of previous contact. So, on one hand, the gathering was the first contact between students and professors and, on the other hand, there was an already conducted and current present discourse about Institutional Critique. What the group experienced, and which caused several group splittings as a consequence, was conflicts around the idea of what an institution is and what it can be. For instance, realizing that the institution(s) are in us. We are the institution(s).

Of course, the new students could be integrated in the already existing group, but patriarchal and racial conflicts present in the power structure of the master program as well as in the artistic-political position of some students, washed off any possibility of it happening. After days of talking and trying to communicate, parts of the group started experimenting in a direct “hands on” - way. So, the spontaneous performances presented in the residency were not a result of integrated collective work, but instead some weird battle for the possibility of speech. It is no coincidence that the group, which worked together until the final exhibition were either BPOC students or new students, who are self-identified white females. In the end, the already well known question “who can speak?”, remained. After the residency, the group that remained to continue developing the work was very fruitful and, despite the difficulties, the decision to split the group in two, automatically generating two final works, happened naturally, within the experiences and tensions lived in the collective process. Affinities and disaffinities always arise, and in our group, they were welcomed and elaborated in different ways by each member, trying to meet the different interests and needs that emerged during the process.

During this period of almost a year, we have come quite a long way. In the Gathering we organized a discussion with activists and artists from different countries. The organization required a lot of resources. We often met offline, which was very valuable during the pandemic, when personal contacts were kept to a minimum. In addition, it was more important than ever to collaborate with colleagues from regions where revolutionary events were gaining momentum, for example, in Belarus, Rojava and the United States, and thereby support their resistance. In preparation for the Exhibition, we focused on individual works (with periodic online discussion) and developed the design of the installation together, which was quite productive in the conditions of 2nd or 3rd corona waves.

The specific circumstances generated by Covid-19 did not affect the process and the final works presented, but rather they were the initial starting point and became the formal and conceptual basis for everything that was developed. The material absence of other bodies was one of the main challenges. It made us question on a deeper and more intuitive level what reality really is, what materiality is, what presence is, what the Other is, and what/who “I” means. Does this “I” really exist? If so, how? The exercises were a way to live these questions intensely, rather than trying to overcome them or to develop strategies to deal with them.

Our collective exercises and methods became a carrier bag of resources, incorporating the intersection of screen-based realities and physical, bodily realities of human beings. Mirroring, echoing and feed-backing enabled us to share parts of our knowledge, abilities and perspectives. Also, the predominantly use of technical devices was accompanied by interruptions, fragmentations, folds and back-folds, waves of consensus and dissent which shaped and shifted our group configurations.

Basically, all these images and ideas of present, absent, “remote” bodies/screens/cables and their (dis)-connections can be recognized in the final works.

The situationship of a semi-institutional space gave us agency of questioning how we can gather, encounter and self-organize collectively within institutional, socio-political and geo-political structures. Thus, our existing, present bodies which inhabited the space are part of environmental conditions. This perspective on space stretched our possibilities to play, the emergence of contingency and uncertainty, as well as the risk of exposing. Improvised tangible interactions became events of performing-for-each-other with-in space, as the collaborative group process successively became the focus of our further work.

The public space, where we started working, indeed left a taste of “being under construction”, of dealing or trying to deal with the unforeseen and unexpected that are intrinsic to public spaces. After the residency, these spaces continued to be a meeting place for us, since we could not meet in closed environments. Sometimes the contact was online, sometimes in public space. In both cases the questioning about seeing and being seen had a great weight. Who is watching me? How? From which angle? Where is this look coming from? What is being seen? Do I see myself when observing the other? At what moment does the private become public? Of course, these questions are part of what we understand as performance, but in our case, because we were performing for each other almost all the time online, within an intimate environment, the idea of voyeurism entered the scene really quickly, and these questions took a more complex proportion. We no longer knew who was performing and who was watching, or if, in fact, there was such a difference.