More than 200 years ago Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet and naturalist, wrote: ‘I went into the forest. For my own self, and nothing to seek. That was my purpose.’
100 years later James Joyce’s protagonist Leopold Bloom meandered through Dublin for 18 hours. What if we unite Goethe’s sensitisation with James Joyce’s meandering, and refer this idea to the present? How do we ‘meander’?
We have to ask ourselves: how do mentally sensitive subjects respond to the processes of our time? What is growing in us? How do we react to these social oscillations and how do we interpret them? How does the sensitisation develop when identity-virtualities are considered as orientation, what then characterises empathy here!
The Meander project raises these questions but does not look for answers, functioning as a ‘snapshot’ (connecting moments in time).
The Meander project is planned for the end of 2023 / beginning of 2024. 55 international cultural workers (artist-performers, video-filmmakers, virtual natives, sound-noise artists, eco-architects, poets and writers) will take part worldwide and about 30 theorists will make a cultural contribution to the project.
Cultural practitioners will be asked to perform a 12-hour meander in a performance decided by the individual. About 30 theorists are expected to contribute to a collective text. Other forms of contributions are also possible to discuss. The results will be collected after the performance (end 2023 / Jan. 2024). Together with the participants the organisers will create a living exhibition based on the results of the performances (March 2024), presented on two continents.
Project participation implies:
- Payment for work on the meander, or text contribution, or other project work
- Payment for travel costs to the place of the presentation.
- The presentation part is going to happen in Berlin and one other location (ongoing research, contacts are welcome as well).
