Paper short abstract:

Con.Currents: Points of Sublation was an exhibit-performance marking the culmination of a five-year collaborative/inter-creative curatorial project. An interrogation of creative practices and critical spectatorships, it proposes new modes of community engagement through creative cultural work.

Paper long abstract:

Con.Currents: Points of Sublation (2017) is a performance curatorial project that aims to interrogate notions and practices of performance-making in general, and of creative processes and critical spectatorships in particular, through a series of conversations conveyed in multiple modalities of collaborative and intermedial expressions: choreo-cinematographic experimentations, curated performances, and community engagements. Deeply invested in how inter-creative productions transform and are transformed by interrelations of bodies, histories, technologies, and different communities of spectatorship, the project calls attention to the transformations of ideas in light of changing contexts and social provocations, and seeks emancipatory spaces of cultural practice in the mutual inscriptions of meaning in these collaborative productions.

This presentation is thus an articulation of how the exhibit-performance Con.Currents: Points of Sublation, as an event/experience, reinscribes meaning in the processes of engagement between and among the collaborating artists and participating audiences within the specific conditions afforded by the technologies co-curating the experience, such that viewing the exhibit-performance becomes both an experience of the performance and a moment in the performance's unfolding.

Experimental in its form but fundamental in its resolve, Con.Currents: Points of Sublation attempts to return the ritual consumption of performance events back to the radical vitality of critical dialogue and conversation. Such a process engenders a powerful and potentially radical mutual consciousness between and among the collaborators, materials, sites, bodies, technologies, and spectators implicated in the work, thereby proposing possibilities for building new, more emancipatory modes and cultures of creative and critical production.