Relations In this connection, the question of how the participants related to each other during and after the performance process come up. The exchanges of narratives created encounters or even new relations between several of the participants. To examine these encounters, Bourriaud’s theory of Relational Aesthetics9 on the encounter between artwork and beholder helped Illustrate some interesting potentials in this performance project. Therefore I examined the participants as beholders of each other’s staged narratives. But what are these relations good for? Claire Bishop’s Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics emphasises the need for asking what kind of relations the artwork creates seen from a democratic point of view10. I found that the theatre concept of 100% København is highly based on antagonisms through live voting, as expressed in the follow statement: “It‘s okay that people have different attitudes to different issues, whether they vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In Iraq, I was always right, but here I have learned to accept and respect other people’s attitudes“.
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This example of the non- consensus-seeking aspects illustrates the democratic quality in the performance concept. When I asked all the participants how they related to each other, I got the following answers: The participants, who experienced new individual relations to some of the other participants, explained that the relations were either based on common interests or curiosity. This group of participants experienced a temporary sense of community. The participants, who experienced a new relation to the other participants as a group, explained that the relation was based on the shared aesthetic experience and the sense of community during and after the performance: “During the time we have been together, we’ve come closer to each other much more than with many others you meet in your life. It’s almost like colleagues, whom you’ve been working with for 20 years”. And the narrative process of the individual is depending on the collective: “It’s like running a 100 metre race and finish in a good time. But we only did it because of the solidarity between us”.
Regardless of the length of the relations, this suggests that the performance’s narrative process has a potential to create
encounters, relations and a sense of community between the participants. The exhibition - a close-up on the identities The photo exhibition 100% København was a documentation and a development of the theatre concept, focusing on the individual with staged and aesthetically beautiful portraits of the participants. In the accompanying text, the participants talk about a social taboo or personal topic, which makes them stand out of the crowd. The topics count alcohol abuse in the family, having a donor baby as a single mom, and the lack of identification in society for citizens with other ethnic background than Danish, just to mention a few. Thus the portraits invite the beholders to reflect on their attitude towards these topics. On the official opening of the exhibition, the museum guests had the opportunity to meet the participants sitting next to their portraits. These living portraits invited the spectators to take part in a dialogue through the aesthetic presentation of the participants’ statements. The exhibition toured in Copenhagen in public spaces and in arts and community centres of the different city districts and finished in the City Hall of Copenhagen. A Micro-Utopian City Experiment According to Bourriaud, relational art creates an arena for inter-human encounters and exchange. Here utopian experiments can be tested to create models for the real world. ”The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist”11. This means that the participants’ encounters
and human interactions in the process of 100% København are interesting from a social point of view. The concept of Bourriaud’s Micro-Utopia differs from the classical concept of Utopia, which is defined as a collective project and an idealisation or alternative, but it is nowhere to be found. This is implemented in the ambiguous name Utopia, the merge of Eutopia (the good place) and Outopia (nowhere)12.
The concept of the Micro-Utopia acts through the arts on a micro-scale and has the potential to create an inter-human encounter. The aesthetic experience, which a person can get