And I've been running away from the wise man in my head
And he says, go, go, go, go get lost in the wind
And I've been hearing some whispers on the wind
And they say, run, run, run, run away for your sins
Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride
Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride
“Fiery Heart, Fiery Mind”, Alice Phoebe Lou
Physical space and cultural project make Lafayette Anticipations distinct as an institution. Lodged in a building designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas, Anticipations enjoys a pretty-much entirely modular interior space. As a project, the institution explicitly links art, industry and technology in culture production.
Anticipations’ unique interior space practically calls up new visions of live performance; its exhibitions of themselves provoke – without provocation – conversation on where, how, by whom, with and for what culture is produced.
Opened to the public only in 2018 and blessed with its distinct potentialities in space and concept, Anticipations development as an institution is also an opportunity to look at how original intentions and potential can be deployed though time.
The opportunity to observe is why the appointment of Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel as managing director, seconding its founder president Guillaume Houzé, caught my eye. Lamarche-Vadel is 32, Houzé, 38. Lamarche-Vadel is said to have a strong interest in presentation and arrangement of culture production.
The Anticipations’ building is a work of art in a way that no building I can think of is, so the first thing to think about is: How interior space potential is understood in respect to fixed physical plant? In other words: What is the tail, what is the dog, the space potential or plant configuration? Then the question is: How is this understanding to be kneaded into Anticipations’ live performances and exhibitions?
Anticipation’s season-opening dance performance program Echelle Humaine makes me think that, as a work of art, the architecture immediately makes a single unit of “performer-performance-space”. This is because, in much the same way as certain contemporary movement artists seem to be pushing performers to localize within themselves not just performance but also place, Anticipations’ art-architecture strains to make itself performance and performer as well as place/space potential.
Anticipations’ art-architecture is like a choreographer: it’s not enough to hold a show there – there has to be the “show” and “show” has to be there. I’m thinking here of how such artists as Joanne Leighton shape perceived space by the potentials of movement or of how performers such as Bruno Canteteau shape-themselves-into-things-in-space-into-movement-into-poetry.
So, for me, until they tear the building down, Anticipations’ creative challenge will be to align, synthesize, the building-as-choreographer (or artist) with what goes on within it – a challenge that, it seems to me, requires management to take on an artist’s stance, as well as play the demanding stage manager, when it comes to performance.
An artist’s stance, involving an unusually close creative collaboration with (the other) creators must necessarily be the order of the day for Anticipations’ culture-project exhibitions, too.
Conceptually the exhibitions immediately provoke conversation about the intersections and possibilities in innovation, technology and esthetics. But the art-architecture immediately mounts the same challenge as for performance: Is the concept (seen as performer) kneaded into, synthesized with, the building (seen as a work of art) and exhibition (seen as performance)?
The recently wrapped-up exposition by textile designer Hella Jongerius is a concrete example of the challenge. Visitors could get their heads around a “3D” loom (on the model of a “3D” printer), see how computer-assisted weaving works and examine the texture and visual effect of a wide variety of fabric – touching upon technology, innovation, art.
But, as Jongerius intimated when she opened the project by calling for making fabric “helicopters and airplanes”, the exhibits were not separate parts of an endeavor. Rather, they pointed a whole – an overall, integrated, synthetic – vision of the possibilities of re-imagining textile as technology, as innovation, as art. For her exhibition it was Anticipations building as artist (choreographer) – again, a much more assertive, collaborative artist than is ever likely in other institutions – that pulled everything together, that actively called attention to the intersections of the different endeavors, pointed toward conceptual possibility.
In the end, then, Anticipation’s unique architecture demands that management take a strong creator stance as a collaborator among the others and reach, and be seen to be reaching, for synthesis of space potential with performers and performance and concept and exhibition.
If you go by the esthetic success of Yukio Hashimoto doing de Keersmaeker’s classic modern dance (2018) or of multimedia artist Simon Fujiwara playing up the mediatization of human personality (2018), neither performance nor exhibition seems a tough challenge… Until you consider that both conceptually lent themselves to the building’s default symmetries and perspectives. There is not that much work that does.
Most other institutions are their default setting. Anticipations is not. It is a work of art itself, with an independent potentiality. This means that getting the most out of performance and exhibition means, in a way that simply is not true for other institutions, both an assertive artist’s stance and intimate creative collaboration. Neither the one nor the other is simple or straightforward.
On the other hand, the need to take the challenge in hand means Aticipations will always be engaged in trying to unify performer-performance-place. That creative endeavor, “successful” and “unsuccessful” is really worth following.
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