Between 2018-21 I took part in the project patch the sky with 5 colored stones instigated by choreographer Daria Faïn. Originally, the work was intended to premiere as a performance at The Chocolate Factory, New York City in September 2020. Due to the pandemic this plan was cancelled and instead we realized 24-hour digital events, a website (patch the sky with 5 colored stones, accessed 24.1.2025) and an original feature length film, which is still in post-production phase.
In June 2019, four members of the group of 15 in total (Daria Faïn, poet-architect Robert Kocik, composer Christian Schröder and myself) attended Kone Foundation’s Saari residency in Mynämäki, southwest of Finland. At the time the project had a different title, Landing Sites, which was a reference to the works of architects Madeline Gins and Arakawa. Our work at the residency was circling around a Tibetan meditation practice of communicating with five fierce feminine goddesses, Dakinis. Parallel to these daily meditations we would read Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) and do multimedia improvisations. I would later, during the spring 2022, stay at the same residency working on the second examined artistic part of the doctorate.
At the residency, I continued my practice in the context of the project and composed an iteration of the letter performance format, along with other collaborative experiments. During the pandemic phase of the project, the collective process of the working group became a fruitful exploration of multilocal performance practices as we searched for ways to fit our approach to a condition in which we could not enter the theatre, or even access the same continent, and instead all participants, both performers and the audience were situated in different locations and time zones. We were especially exploring the possibilities of the conference call format, which had suddenly become the primary environment of artistic collaboration.
T h e t e r m a n d t h e p h e n o m e n o n o f a u d i e n c e
Reading Barad made think of some analogies between physics and performing arts. Let us superimpose the paradigm shift in the field of physics (from the system of classical Newtonian physics to quantum physics) in the field of performing arts. Then the equivalent of Newtonian physics would be 19th century theatre where the auditorium and the stage are distinct and clearly distinguished from each other, minimizing the effect of the audience on the performance. Quantum physics in turn would be the audience-oriented practices of the 20th century, including contemporary theatre, participatory performance, environmental and immersive theatre, Avant-garde movements—rendering all attendees at least potentially agential.
This is further elaborated by Barad’s use of the term phenomenon. Drawing from physicist Niels Bohr, Barad defines phenomena as the inseparability of the observer and the observed and furthermore “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (Barad 2007, 33). They quote physicist Niels Bohr: “the unambiguous account of proper quantum phenomena must, in principle, include a description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement” (op. cit. 119).
In terms of my analogy, the development of esitystaide/beforemance art and related genres exposes and emphasizes the intra-action of all attendees in an artistic arrangement, including the audience—in contrast with art forms, which emphasize the status of an art work independent from its recipients. Barad’s definition of the term phenomenon, denoting the ontological inseparability of the observer and the observed, fits especially well in my definition of the audience body.
G a t h e r i n g
Patch the sky with 5 colored stones gave new econo-political meaning for gathering within the context of my research. The form of collectivity created by the project was multifaceted. The work was authored and the group was convened by Faïn but at the same time the practices and methods used in it had a strong sense of collaboration and horizontality in terms of power. One of the background influences to our collective practice was the Commons Choir, a long-term project by Faïn and Kocik, combining their interest in prosody, embodied practice, collective action and economics (Commons Choir, accessed 24.1.2025).
As the pandemic shattered our original plans we needed to re-iterate our conception of collectivity. The group was situated on different sides of the globe—most on the east coast of the USA, some in Europe and some on the west coast of the USA. Through the development of Internet-mediated call services, we were able to gather online, but with the reality of different time zones as a condition. We started to do collective improvisations with that tool and eventually ended up with the idea of a 24-hour performance. This choice was made due to two reasons: as the use of conference call services soon became conventional, we had the need to test its limits and find ways of using the medium creatively. Secondly, we wanted to account for the globally scattered nature of our working group and link this experience of the planetary scale to the performance structure.
This was in my experience a truly original form of gathering in the context of performance. There was a virtual site where the gathering took place, which was the zoom link. There was a group of performers who were distributed across continents and took part according to the cycle of the globe, being more present when it was daytime in their location and more asleep when it was night. This made visible the turning of the earth and at the same time enabled participation at any moment from any of the locations. Audience members also had the same choice to enter this virtual space at any time. It was contemporaneous with regard to the aspect of time and scattered with regard to the aspect of space, and the composition of the collective body was in a constant state of change.
S u b o r d i n a t i o n , c o m p l i c i t y a n d r e s o n a n c e
In their book Barad claimed that instead of seeing the world as representations, as had been conventional in physics, we should use a performative framework. Everything, all entities in the universe, do something, are in a process of change and active agents in it. “The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and materialization...” (Barad 2007, 140) This performative theory seems to align easily with performing arts, making Barad’s work attractive to performance makers. The book even begins with a reference to a theatre play.
However, I felt reluctant to accept the theory of agential realism presented in the book. Firstly, I felt that for a performing artist, this was not a revelation at all, rather performativity of everything was the normal situation. Secondly, through my practice I thought that the idea that everything is agential did not convey the reality of the performing arts. In my thinking, the medium of theatre was based on the co-existence of two functions or components: one performative, one receptive (a term which I would later replace with resonant). Without this polarity there would be no theatrical charge. Yes, one could say that the audience also has agency, but leaving it at that would not pay attention to the dynamics that made theatre, or esitystaide/beforemance art, what it was. The proposal that everything is agential does not enable a polarity and it does not give tools for conceptualizing a subordinate relation. While some of my thoughts on the phenomenon of audience seemed compatible with Barad’s theory, the asymmetric relation between resonant audiences and agential performers seemed to be missing.1 I would later verbalize these thoughts through the concepts of resonance, subordination and complicity.
A l l - i n c l u s i v e l i m i n a l i t y
It is worth noting the fact that the covid-19-pandemic, which would escalate during this artistic process, became a state of global, all-inclusive liminality. It would also include and condition several of the following drafts. At first, we waited for it to end swiftly—after a while, drifting to the other extreme, feared that it would never end. But it did end, and the survivors returned to the everyday, transformed.
T e m p o r a l a n d s p a t i a l s c a t t e r i n g o f t h e p e r f o r m a n c e
When writing the letter to my colleagues Daria, Robert and Christian, I discovered that the letter provided the possibility of including several times and places from which I could address the audience. I wrote it on several occasions and articulated at least some of those into the upper right-hand corner of the first page, where the date of writing is typically marked.
I thought that this would expand the time- and space-specific event of reading to all those places and times. In terms of literature, this could be basic knowledge and probably quite a conventional tool of writing. But it opened something important to me. As the era of the Covid-pandemic, which at the time of writing the letter was looming and was unanticipated by me, would show, also the audience body of performing arts could and would be stretched.
While the asynchronous audience body of Draft 14 was still potentially alive in Venice at the time of our work in Saari, I returned to audience bodies gathered in a specific time-places, which in this case supported our work at the residency. I was also considering whether the slippage into the sphere of literature or some other genre would result in an inability to keep the work meaningful in terms of performing arts and especially esitystaide/beforemance art.
Phenomenological practice
In Saari, I also continued my line of practice of documenting an audience experience through writing, earlier experimented in Drafts 12 and 14. This practice was inspired by the phenomenological research cell (see Draft 11). I tried documenting our sessions by writing down my experience constantly and in real time:
“Mon July 1st, 12.15 - 13.15
Robert places a chair in front of the large doorway. The doorways has two metal doors, one of which is open. On the inner side of the doors there is a gateway created by the thickness of the wall; the depth of the door-way is thus about one meter. The chair is within this doorway, close to one of its walls, and in front of the open door. The back of the chair is outwards; the chair is facing the room. This placement underlines the meaning of the spatial specificity of an audience perspective. The positioning of the chair suggest looking at the room. However, the sounds of the outdoor space are especially strong in the doorway. Auditorily it combines the indoor and the outdoor spaces. Additionally, light flows in from outside through the doorway, from behind the sitter. The sitter is thus placed both between two spaces and inside one of them: the chair is both inside and in the doorway, and the sensual world opening from it is composed of both spaces and yet suggests that visually important things will take place in the room. When sitting on the chair, the outdoor space acts as the periphery. The wind blows on the skin of the sitter. The birds are singing and flying behind their back. The back is exposed to invisible influences: someone might attack the sitter from behind, if they approached quietly. Daria is laying on the floor with her hands on top of her chest in a gesture. The hands grab her head and her feet rise diagonally towards the ceiling. One arm reaches from between the legs, the knees move towards the forehead, which the fingers of the other hand point to. The movement is controlled, exact, and seems to have symbolic, ritualistic or magical meaning. Magical in the sense that the movement is based on a correspondence with the structures of the world, and aims to have an effect on their realization. Two long pieces of wood clap together like hands of a mechanical audience member. The sounds are supported by a constant noise of some colour emanating from the loudspeakers. The wind slightly massages the scalp of the sitter as it moves their hair back and forth. Daria is drawing a semi-circle with her right foot and leaning back into a knotted asana. The birds and the morphous drone from the speakers compete for attention, then complement each other, then separate into two different universes indifferent to each other. The drone becomes louder, almost unbearable, violently intruding into the body of the sitter. It moves in the space, hiding its violence in the movement, and then starts to perform a wave function through a gradual shifting back and forth or up and down in pitch. A bottle of metal quietly accompanies the fluctuation. The dancer turns around, back and forth, or right and left, the arms finding a path as determinate snakes. One finger on an acupoint, another hand in a mudra, palm pressing against the air. Then more fluid, the tense extremities of the body start to melt and sway. The invisible buttons of a laboratory device are pressed and turned. An artificial wind blows from the speakers, turning into an ascending note mimicking an old-school synthesizer. The long wooden applauders silently witness the events, with an imagined sway in the wind on their bodies. Daria starts to yawn, but right, you can’t yawn on stage, except by representing a yawn. It is instead the tongue showing the way for the face, the neck, the spine. The tongue with its questionable agency, is imprisoned and enabled by the ligaments attaching it to the edge of the throat. The wooden pair moving the hand of Robert, with the right lahje [Eng. pant leg] tucked inside the green sock. Fast and loud stomping banally attract the attention of the sitter, the stage empties out for Christian to move in with the tripod. The camera performs as a documentation device, as if it is not performing at all, and at the same time suggesting this perspective, inaccessible from the chair, is worth taking. The tripod in addition performs as a part of a laboratory apparatus, offering an immobile base for the measuring device, enabling thus the configuration of the concept of position. The frame of the insect net is making a clicking sound, making a point of its multiple uses: as a protection, as an instrument of discrimination, as a musical instrument. Some words are exchanged, implying at a meta-level, that what is happening is not a matter of every-day experience, but that this is framed, discerned, detached from the whateverness and unfocusedness of non-work. What is taking place is an experimentation, art, research, or something like that. This is not anything, this is something. Something mirroring nothing, something performing the everything-ness, which is beyond the reach of performance and yet its motivation. Syllables escaping from words into vibration, music, acts. A page of writing is arranging itself into a relation with an hour of audiencing, forms are communicating across the boundaries of modality. An unexpected revelation is always a result of disciplined practice and unproductive confusion. The beauty of singing human beings is consistent in a mysterious way. A scarf on the shoulders of the singer is semi-transparent, suggesting a web of Indra or a filter between the consciousness of the sitter and its object, by association even the entanglement of the agencies of observation with their objects. The cavities of the ears of the sitter are full of sound, packed with the waveforms bouncing”
Weaving
I had had a practice of using yarn and rope as performance materials already for years, for example in 12 Etudes on Everlasting Life. Tying ropes into different compositions which could include human and other bodies was a very physical practice with roots especially in the Japanese art of bondage, Shibari, which I had learned for the most part from my collaborator Dashniya Sommer. However, it also suggested a way of thinking, one which is composed of connections, restrictions, intensities, agencies and resonations. While I never pursued it consciously as a subject of my research, weaving compositions out of ropes and threads from filaments has lurked its way to formulate one of the structural logics of this commentary. Furthermore, I have visualized the referential system, which I experience as the weight-bearing structure of the academic environment, as a similar web of connecting lines and knots of meaning, into which I have tied my own body of work.
1 Annette Arlander suggested in the pre-examination of the commentary that the audience-performance duality could be analysed via the wave-particle dilemma. “Electrons act (or perform) as waves or as particles depending on the measuring apparatus. An audience can turn into more active participants or more passive recipients depending on the apparatus?”
This is a fascinating proposal and could be further examined in the future.