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In November 2020, Toni Steffens and Keerthi Basavarajaiah were invited by Veem House for Performance to co-curate a 10 days event on the broader understanding of the term "movement" and share their perspective on it. In the midst of the pandemic with a big portion of luck, they generate a temporal "micro social space" inviting locally based artists to share their work, or research and inhabit the space of Veem House. Guiding interest of the curation was to look at precarious artists, who's practices and research emerges out of an embodied understanding of movement, which directly responds to confrontations with daily life in Europe, Amsterdam, informing this life continuously on a socio-political, sytemic, cultural, racial and existential level.
Participating artists :
Raoni Saleh
Mami Kang
Nica Roses
Matthew Day
Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Toni Steffens
The following text is a reflection of the event and what motivated the curation in the particular time of pandemic in relation to the artistic and ethical concerns of the artists.
January 2021, Toni Steffens and Keerthi Basavarajaiah
What is it to curate(“curare” which means to care for) to tend towards a community? What is at stake in the current dance scene of Amsterdam? More so in relation to the current conditions? Amidst the pandemic, what is it to work out a small gesture in a city like this one? In November 2020, the miraculous possibility for us opened up, to share a space for performative works and practices, within 2 weeks. The theatres were able to be open, a tiny, hopeful window during lockdown.
Apart from there being an obvious, practical dimension in choosing Amsterdam-based artists, we were facing decisive productional and pandemic- related restrictions and constraints of movements, such as travel complications. Within Amsterdam, a fairly small city, a big part of dancers, choreographers, and artists come from similar schools and educational contexts. What makes this particular is not that we are all "friends of the same niche", but that we share an interest for a movement that for us, finds its resonance in the sensitivity that navigates process, relation and the respective "results" in and emerging from our works.
With this co-curation we proposed a micro- social space where precarious practices and identities were given space, a curatorial gesture, tending to be, generally speaking, lacking. While looking at existential questions that haunt every artist in this city, one sleeps next to these questions and yet sees that there is not one answer in the diasporas of individuals and their realities. There are always “findings” of ways to move through minor socialites and practices, to keep existing, keep moving.
November 10x10 was not proposed as a platform to answer these questions and yet also, not to dismiss these questions: the proposition of our curation exposed some realities where these existential situations let some very interesting practices emerge.
The artists we choose are living precariously on the fragile ground of the freelance scene, they are not represented by a house, neither do they all benefit from artist development funds. Most of them are at the beginning some in their mid- career, doing their first steps or have done multiple marathons within the exhausting context of the freelance artist reality.
Due to the reality of Covid-19 we explicitly turned towards our direct community, trying to see which of the artists, whose practice we know of and therefore can care in the best way for, might be able to benefit from this shared opportunity. And to be exact about the context, it is important to highlight that the opportunity of November 10x10 "Movement" curation resulted out of the opportunity Toni Steffens was given to make a new work, co produced by Veem and NB projects. Veem House, for the first time experimented with the proposal to invite “artists” not “curators” to facilitate a 10x10 programme.
We were therefore, co-curating together with Veem House for performance, a small house that indeed fights for its existence too. In this particularly encounter, one can find our gaze, as a guide for the curation: Keerthi’s, Toni’s and Veem house’s. But also, one can find a broader conversation on movement, through the presentations of the different works of the invited artists, and the particular gaze that these invited individuals brought along.This came along with the sensitivities of having to stay vulnerable through our own works and voices and to move with and towards the care of keeping these fragilities close to us.
We as co-curators, are, first of all, artists, ourselves. Artists yet at the beginning of our career while having as well already collected information and experiences in the field. While we ourselves are surviving on the edge, we really could empathise to share the resources with those survivors on the edges.
Questions that navigated us during the process of this curation were, how does an individual artist can exist with an institution like Veem House? Or how can their practice be recognised beyond the institutions they left, schools and institutes? what happens to their voices? their existence? their perspective?
The practices and artists we were looking at were displaying a level of embodiment, stemming from confrontations with their lives, and in their trajectories. Trajectories and lives we decided to speak openly about in the conversation that happened in and with Veem. We generated a space where within the conversation big doubts, fears, and even suicidal tendencies resulting from a lack of support we’re openly shared.
It was seen in the work of Matthew Day where he created false idols to find modes to survival- movement by creating unorthodox relations to the current states, such as reposition himself to his upbringing. Or, for instance, in Raoni Saleh’s “Lashes came”, where he is carrying the suffering of his grandmother along, losing her youngest son to war. As he shared his social practice of mourning and griefing in his performance, he engaged and took us on a vulnerable, intimate ritual both in the workshop “Mourning/ Moaning Sociality” and his work. Nica Roses -Open studio sessions looked at their deep need for communal ways of making work and facilitating the emergence of a creation with care and in the context of inviting friends and strangers, throughout their residency.
It was seen in Toni Steffens work of ‘An Attendee’ that looks at the precarity and subtleties of having to tend- /attend while carrying important and almost self-neglecting questions through her research, or in Keerthi Basavarajaiah’s “luring whispers” which proposes a sideways perception- relations to our surroundings to tend to backgrounded forces at play. And finally we could see Mami Kang’s transmission, which unites materiality and immateriality as a form of faith in the current oversaturated world by using the body as a kinetic and technological tool. It was also Mami Kang that shared how this tool, her body, was the precise medium to hold on to, when moving from Japan to Amsterdam, struggling with language and the brutality of the foreign exclusive set-up of the city.
If we look at places for dance and movement in Amsterdam, we were very well aware that a couple of notions on movement and dance already have an existing space, platform, and necessary support to build the view on dance and performance available to a public in Amsterdam. We choose to make a more intimate and more nourishing format towards the community we are part of while at the same time acknowledging the richness and profound works people in our scene are doing, every day and despite incredible conditions. Inside our program, one could find brilliant artists with solid, thought- provoking, and urgent questions and practices. Already in this micro sociality, there are many different voices and insights to listen to and due to the obvious circumstances, this is what we felt was most important to do.
In the neoliberal climate of Amsterdam, in our opinion, the direct care inside of the community is highly lacking- care is not just the gesture of inviting an artist for presenting a show- it starts with tending towards one another not with assumption and ignorance, such as claiming our perspective, but with curiosity, with the idea that you can hold a space for the complexity of the person and their life right next to you. In a place where many of us feel lonely and undermined, many of us think there is nothing outside of the institutions, this co-curation emerged out of an actual conversation between artists and institutions. And Whether one likes it or not, this conversation is rare and for now still exceptional.
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