We artists don't create artworks. We invent practices.

We artists don’t create artworks. We invent practices.

Silvio Lang

We artists don’t create artworks. We invent practices. Silvio Lang @silviolang2022

Originally published in spanish as Manifiesto de la práctica escénica, in “El tiempo es lo único que tenemos: Actualidad de las artes performativas”, Bárbara Hang y Agustina Muñoz (Comps.). Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2019.

Bilingual edition by microutopías | Publication Studio Montevideo @microutopiaspress @ps_montevideo

Translated into english by Florencia Lastreto @florencialastreto Edition and graphic design by Darío Marroche @daromarroche

Illustration by Juan Palarino @palalalarino

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We artists don’t create artworks. We invent practices.

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How do we relate and how do we take part in the field of the practice we do and how does that field overflow its execution?

Where there is an affection, an investigation is born.

To create potentialities involves questioning the existing modes of production.

We artists don’t create artworks. We invent practices.

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We artists do not create artworks. We invent practices. Centuries of exploitation have fetishized and commodified our activity and alienized our subjectivities to culture and market’s power devises. The artwork is secondary to the artistic practice we do. What we do is invent sensitive practices. These practices are ways of use and experimentation protocols concerning space, time, body organs, movement, perception. As an effect of these uses, we artists and public or artists not yet self-perceived as such, compose affections and unprecedented concepts.

The artwork only matters as an archive of the future and as a material support of the perceptive experience of the present.

It is those concepts and affections, that go through our bodies and shape the corpus of cultural production that travel through societies and eras, that forge our existential politics. Any practice created from the artistic activity is a practice of subjective mutation and social connection. Mutation and connection both for the artists that transform their own way of life and for the audiences that are pushed towards invention and to a becoming artist.

The relationship between “artist/participant is a continual play of mutual tension, recognition and dependency – more akin to the BDSM model” (Claire Bishop).

The artistic practice is a traversing power that creates a common setting of procedures and conditions of uprising and mutation, from the classified and sheltered ways of life.

The practice involved in an artwork – we would like to speak of as delusional investigations – is a movement of the earth. The artistic activity undoes, re-imagines and re-makes the land of the conqueror. It is a practice of “inner decolonization” (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui) and inventions of ways of life. The social dispute is for the ways of life.

Thus, becoming an artist is an activity of recomposing the multiplicity of universes that constitute the earth. We become and we take over the dispute for the composition of the ways of life. We discuss the technologies of our lives and modes of existence. Inventing a practice implies to provide ourselves of the resources to transform and create the material state of the situation that involves us. Therefore, there are not those illuminated ones that are artists and create artworks and those who are incapable and can’t. Rather, there are some that take on the possibility of inventing practices and others who are in the closet, or don’t have access, or don’t feel like it.

The thinking required in the study of a situation that affects us and the own method of getting to know the elements and connections that constitute it, added to the practice emerged from this process unleash a subjective intellectual adventure that anyone can experience.

Each autonomous experimental investigation is connected to certain materials and composition plans that can pierce through different artistic fields, at the same time as displace each of those same fields, intersect them with other fields of other practices and create their own aberrant alliances. Those displacements and alliances compose materialities and give way to new practices or ways of doing. The materialities or the becoming thing of artworks are the “reifications” (Paolo Virno) of the practices or the soundboxes enabling that the imagination of the connections of the movements of the earth to take place.

It’s about talking less about artworks and more about practices.

It is here where the Capital shivers. Because capitalism pays us for artwork – a delusion of the commodity fetish and the hourly job wage -, but not for inventions of practices with which it lays out its cis-heteronormative and inclusive world. Capitalism exploits and doesn’t stop conquering our libido that manufactures ways of life out of the movements of the earth. Libidos of the earth, revolt! Therefore, we say: “Artist’s salary” (Hernán Borisonik) for everyone who self-perceives as such.

Let capitalism not be able to pay us and end.

How do we relate and how do we take part in the field of the practice we do and how does that field overflow its execution?

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How do we relate and how do we take part in the field of the practice we do and how does that field overflow its execution? The scenic practice is a specific manner of producing time-space blocks, material images, ways of perceiving and knowing, through which affections that are concepts are passed.

How do we do it? How do we participate in that power of materialization? What are the performatic practices that we activate in ourselves and share publicly? Is our practice autonomous or is it colonized by the affiliation and the mentoring of the field where we are active? Are we willing to flee from those structures of obedience?

If our scenic practice is a way of re-materializing the movements of the earth, it is then, at the same time, a way of re-making ourselves. The practices we create, the affections we pass through them, do not leave us unscathed. To decolonize ourselves from the field where we move, sometimes involves certain loneliness in being able to create new alliances and affectionconcepts that let us breathe. However, it is through this loneliness that our live is filled with insurrectionary alliances with friends that were unthought of and strike out.

It is with those insurrectionary alliances and collective affective insurgencies that common desires are hatched.

Within the scenic practice there is still one figure folded into patriarchy that prevents alliances from being weaved and that, instead, stablishes hierarchies: the figure of the director. We say: directors we are all.

To direct is to produce a number of relations, associations, conjunction of forces or intensity of unthought of thoughts being materialized. One is more in a maddened earth storm than at the helm of full sense. The direction moves among forces and thus composes common desires. A common desire is not your desire, plus that of the other, plus mine. It is not the sum of desires. It is the transindividual desire of the undetermined of our allied libidos. They are unconscious that come together.

Who are our allies?

With which unconscious are we going to intersect and weave our way of life? Are the direction’s questions. But the stage direction is not a leadership or tutelage of people. The direction forges an autonomous experimental investigation of the creative process. And participating in that directing are all those who are able to relate what is being thought and felt. The direction is a plan of absorption of the strengths and microevents emerging from the creation process. If there is a director (self)perceived as such by the others, since the direction equality method makes it possible for anyone to experience the becoming director, that director is a strabismic weaver. The gaze going

through the thousand spotlights and n-branches of the performance.

To direct is a lysergic experience of multiplicity.

I connect, bring in, blend and hallucinate intensities of the power of the plot of the group directions’s events. With my languager needle, that names sensitive time, I weave the layout of a common desire. It is an extraordinary function of the director role, not to neutralize the affections or strengths of a situation, but to recognize them, liven them up and set them in common. The director creates a plan to deal with the inconsistencies of the mutation process that every rebellious practice involves. But that plan is not a political program, even though the manner of being may be, it is not a script although there can be one, it is not a declaration of principles although terms and conditions can be agreed to: it is a toolbox to unleash strengths, a tremendous hemp to join powers, it is a seismograph to listen to affections, it is an idiolect to become together. It’s a consistency plan to turn into others and be multiple. A plateau that opens to experiment the multiplicity of becoming. A plan that consolidates a mutation, a difference to submission.

It is, therefore, an antifascist plan: it unfreezes identity fixations, it breaks up compulsive helplessness and paranoia to carry out transverse complicities and rebellious mixtures. The consistency plan of the creation process is a battle, a sensitive war machine. The director is its partisan in civil war, the witch that they couldn’t burn, your queer friend hatching alliances.

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Where there is an affection, an investigation is born.

How is the consistency plan of this sensitive war machine made? It begins with a delimitation, a diagonal cut in the time and space of your mind, a backstitch of a route that is imposed on you, the trace of a circle of thought in which you wish to immerse. It’s the mental blueprint where we lean on and glide to study an affection. Something we want to think of, but that resists to be thought of under the terms we already have. Something that we need to pass through the body to mutate. Where there is an affection, a study is born, it is our lighthouse chant. This is how we become an own body being others.

The consistency plan is a proto-scenic mental space. It is a dreaminess plane of our expression or unique potential. It is from there that we compose the proceedings, the materials, the conditions, the allies, and the concepts of our power to act. In Deleuze and Guattari they are the planes of composition and immanence. It is not so much the plan of the work, but rather from which, among other things, the artwork emerges. It is the plan of an autonomous experimental investigation. A delirious investigation.

The first thing is a desire for a subjective mutation. Being fed up with the life they make us live. A protest against the neoliberal way of life.

We artists are unconscious that protest.

We no longer want this capitalist normality that prevents us from living the singular time. We don’t fit in, we are too dirty, intense, excessive, maladjusted to the regime of the obviousness of the heterosexual realism. Chaos suits us. We like to give ourselves our own affections. Amid the weariness of normalized life, an affection or multiplicity of strengths passes through us.

We fail before the authority over and over, we often fall ill because of heartbreaks, we suffer different types of violence, we are mesmerized by other bodies, we get high to experiment, we rejoice too much with one practice, we get involved in others’ situations, we listen to a word that involves us.

From the black and white gradations of the heterosexual and sexist normalized life we create a plan of affection and thought that exceeds the sad conditions fencing us.

They are the “aberrant movements” (David Lapoujade) in the molecules of our bodies and minds. They are the “lines of flight” (Guattari) of the unbreathable situations with which we prepare the plan of an investigation that is vital, necessary, urgent, absolute, monumental, public.

Something is happening to us; we don’t know why it affects us so much. What to think, what to do with that. From an unspeakable situation, a research area

is opened. However, this affection in situation is not individual: the affections are forces that come from the social diagram. We are beings individuated by social affections. What we call life dissolves into a force field that Foucault called “power”.

We are social individuals, we are multitude.

This social individuation in us is constant, dynamic, and mutant: it puts us together and breaks us apart from our most undetectable particles. The capitalist power knows it. The social moves and moves us by affections that develop into fondness that, at the same time, create desires or the strength to act. Capitalist power creates or modifies knowledge and devices that decode the forces that circulate and weave the social to organize them under the global market’s unique truth. Coptic? Yes. But not necessarily people, but intensities of fondness and concepts that cross through people. Capitalism doesn’t kill or prohibit anything unless what is in persistent insubordination. What capitalism does is to profit by mitigating and normalizing affective insurgencies.

Capitalism is a great translator-adapter. While our autonomous experimental investigation of what affects us, foucaultly wonders: what affections are acting now?

What fondness ways of life do they take? What are the knowledge-devices that are modifying them?

What are the resistances to those knowledge-devices and how can we produce more resistances?

As seen, the interrogative time of our investigation is a cartographic and materialistic one: it consults what happens with and to the matter that composes and moves us socially. It’s ongoing research. Therefore, it often works with statements of a present loaded with past. Without a materialistic cartography of the forces of the present loaded with past, neither an “inner decolonization” nor an autonomy of the practices we take on, is possible.

We will continue in remote control, left to the capitalist unconscious, lacking time, condemned to a life of consensual slavery, of violence and several submissions.

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To create potentialities involves questioning the existing modes of production.

Any rebellious practice with its provisional and situational method establishes pragmatics. Here, the method is just an intensive strategy for a potentiality to exist. To forge public potentiality out of something that is meant to have minor intensity, it is necessary to provide oneself of a provisional method, assembled as we investigate in the pragmatic field. If we don’t reconfigurate the way in which we do things, nothing changes.

To create intensified potentiality is to craft the public sphere. The public sphere exists in every instance because of the potentialities that affect it. The rebellious potentialities create relations that did not yet exist, they use the resources in a new manner. And a scenic creation is possible from that minor intensity that withstands being thought of.

It is from impotence that potency is produced.

What is our place regarding the unthought of our impotence? There in that which affects us, in that which makes us scream, in the rage against the unique, in each satiety. But also, in every burst of joy, a possibility to think and create exists.

How do we make room for that outbreak? Our singular place of enunciation. The place from where we manifest is a place to be updated. Constantly. It escapes our will, and it is imposed on us. It belongs to no one and it belongs to everyone that takes part.

How is that enunciation trench built? Out of what feelings, what corporalities, what privileges, what categories? How to make of that place “a place of desire”, as the friend choreographer Paulina Mellado says? How do we weave our little altar of innovation, our manifestation land, our monument of decolonized and singular shout?

What are the queries that singularize us? The shout-queries, the rage-queries, the fed up-queries, the joy-queries.

Let’s create, my friends, the questions that we can inhabit, the questions that singularize us, that singularize the connections in which we are involved and participate, that make evident our mutation processes, that require our methodological approaches. Let’s experiment a series of unknown challenges, that risk a body, that make unforeseen intensities go through.

Which bodies are at risk in our experimentations? What risks are we willing to take? We need to invent ourselves “a good enough theory”, as our transvestitetrans leader Marlene Wayar says. We need a scenic attitude or ethics of transvestic inspiration. We need to filter and transescape from the policing of the submissive relationship in which we find ourselves every time.

Our present is settled the moment we can displace the limits of our imported present, the moment we can overflow the hypocrite legitimacy fence of the adapted

society. It is there where the creative possibility of our practice is played.

To create the to-come while being, the “people to come” (Deleuze and Guattari) from the “thousand plateaus” of the earth. Who do we make crowd with? Who are the allies of our populated? Who are our partisan friends of the new politics of the scenic practice?

Friends, we will no longer be genius artists, nor crazy enlightened, nor show freaks, nor prima donnas.