Astrid Newman (Wicklow) & Francesca Hawker (Brussels) have collaborated many times. They share an interest in how language mediates the relationship between audience and performer. Astrid works collaboratively, hosting moments of collective gathering. She has presented work in the Market Gallery, Glasgow, RIA (Dublin) and RAT HOLE Tokyo. In ‘22, she received an Arts Council Strand 1 Project Award and Agility Award. Francesca is a PhD student at LUCA Ghent, researching embarrassment in performance. Recently, she has presented work at Cas-co (Leuven), House van Wassenhove (Ghent), and Q-02 (Brussels).
Lauren Berlant proposes that the present is perceived affectively before it is felt in any other way. In their residency in The Green Corridor Brussels, they seek to create a space in their practices where they can sense and digest the present, a difficult task in a contemporary moment that feels increasingly unreal and imperceptible. Crucially, they aim to develop creative strategies for finding forms for these experiences while avoiding the analysis and subsequent categorisation that so often robs these attempts of their potential.
A central reference for them is The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, a series of vignettes written collaboratively but from afar, each grasping toward a frame for a common experience viewed from within different contexts. In Berlant and Stewart’s words, “collaboration is a meeting of minds that don’t match. Circulation disturbs and creates what’s continuous, anchoring you enough in the scene to pull in other things as you go.”
Inspired by The Hundreds, they are investigating the potential of the vignette and engaging with writing prompts and exercises drawn from a variety of genres (for example, the somatic poetry exercises of CA Conrad and the deep listening exercises of Pauline Oliveros). Through this ongoing collaborative exchange, they will continue to produce a text together and subsequently gather themselves and others around it in order to test a variety of public-facing, participatory scenarios.
In order to share their project and receive valuable feedback, they will be in residence at The Green Corridor in Brussels and Mermaid Arts Centre in Wicklow in March and May, respectively. They intend to host “table reads” at both sites with invited audiences in order to enliven the texts and move beyond their own subjective position as writers.