Reactor 2006-2011

“When Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil invited Célio Turino to develop a programme to democratise access to culture, no one could have imagined the extraordinary initiatives that today cross Brazil from one extreme to the other: from semi-arid sertão to the sea, from Amazônia to the fertile lowlands of the South. The Ponto de Cultura programme has provided instruments for the multiple voices of a diverse nation to find expression in music, literature, petry… Turino’s book is a map of living Brazilian Popular Culture, disseminated to every corner of a nation that is finally seeking to be a country for everyone.” -Emir Sader

Would you like to start changing the world from your living room? What if your neighborhood made its own money? What would happen if all animals, including humans, had equal rights in the park next door? Have you considered that you are flying through space right now? Sibylle Peters, director of Theatre of Research, a Hamburg-based theater dedicated to creating social experiments together with audiences of all ages, invites readers to reimagine the world–and act on it. Based on 20 years of performance-based research, and guided by children’s wishes and concerns, this book of at-home experiments shows you how to change reality through play.

“This publication assembling the practices and discourses of ‘Asian contemporary performance’ is assuredly a statement of ‘the world we have made’ for the now and the future, as well as a means of connecting TPAC and other ‘worlds.’ “－Ruo-Yu LIU, Chairwoman of Taipei Performing Arts Center

“While it is now hardly unusual to find choreographers working in an exhibition setting, or visual artists performing on a stage, it is still rare to see practitioners from the different fields working together, as can be found at ADAM.”－John Tain, Head of Research at Asia Art Archive

“With various understandings from multiple disciplines, life journeys and international practices, this publication is neither a collected manifesto, nor an imprint of harmony and integration. On the contrary, it is the very embodiment of incarnations and trajectories of the world history and the network of contemporary corporeality.”－Chun-Yen WANG, Art Critic

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

The reinforcements mounted by our profane masters have transformed the theatre into a boulevard or, closer to home, into a good-old thoroughfare. In other words, the theatre is a space that hasn’t changed at all. We have to reinforce its mountainous profanities yet again, a little less old-fashioned perhaps, but similarly escorted by those necessary moralists-in-mind and a concomitant mania for marvels. So, here we are.

My dramas- in which I seem to lean on the ludicrous which must be kept so, in order to be accountable, the inspiration of such a work being precisely its utter and insulting reality-must not be born of ‘today’ but of the spells and numerologies of the old masters, the drowsy and doddery in their chic flannel slippers and their well-practised blandishment.

Yoko Ono is an artist who has made an indelible mark on contemporary culture and political activism through her radical and innovative practice. This remarkable and essential publication, developed n collaboration with Yoko Ono and her studio, traces in full the evolution of an artist whose visionary spirit has transcended boundaries and challenged conventions. In Music of the Mind, explore the world of Yoko Ono and discover the profound impact of her art on the collective consciousness of our time.

The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts.

An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. It is in keeping, then, with Conceptual Art that it is best explained through itself, i.e., through the examination of Conceptual Art, rather than through any assumptions outside of itself. In this sense, this book is not a “critical anthology” but a documentation of Conceptual Art and Statements.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

Celebrating ten years of Barnes’ White Rabbit.

He makes everyone smile on a miserable day,

And does lots of things in his own unique way,

He loves art and performance and sometimes he’ll sing,

His outlook on life is a wonderful thing.

He’s quite a celebrity and travelled afar,

He’s met famous people some of them stars,

New countries, new culture and so much more,

To live life to the full is what he aims for.

Around his home town he’s a familiar sight,

With his bright coloured clothes and Japanese bike.

He cycles around shouting hello as he goes,

This is White Rabbit who everyone knows.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.