The School of Infinite Rehearsals | Foreword by Ash Bulayev

THE SCHOOL OF INFINITE REHEARSALS

MOVEMENTS I-IV

THE SCHOOL OF INFINITE REHEARSALS

MOVEMENTS I-IV

by ASH BULAYEV

THIS OR THAT About ten years ago, I played a game. It was a simple game. A game I played in a desert, with the artist and dramaturg Peter Stamer. It was a game of choices. A or B, this or that. A very binary game that any child or computer could play. Peter would ask me to choose between two options, two words, two concepts, two people, two emotions. At a very rapid speed I would answer. It was fun to not overthink and just choose. Love or passion? Passion or compassion? And so on.

Binaries, or rather the necessity of having a binary choice. This or that. I keep wondering why I choose to participate in such binary games in my everyday life. What would happen if I refused? How would my life be transformed if I said no to binary situations?

Today we mostly reference binary choices in relation to computer science and AI, for binary reduces everything to meaningless 0s and 1s. It makes it more convenient, efficient, and cost-effective for machines to read and process quantitative data.

But the binary choices I started to be concerned about in my personal and professional life did not stem from AI problems. The root of Peter Stamer’s game for me, not surprisingly, came from the ancient Greeks, specifically Aristotle who everybody credits with being a founding father of logic, along with biology, political science, zoology. But instead, Aristotle’s contribution in and effect on my life was much more pervasive and overwhelming. Ten years ago, I was reminded about his theory of dualism—whereby something is one or other, true or false, logical or illogical. Twain Liu (2019), an AI specialist, explains it in her article in Quartz much faster than I can, so I will quote this short paragraph for you: Around 350 BC, Aristotle wanted to reduce and structure the complexity of the world. To do this, he borrowed from Pythagoras’s Table of Opposites, in which two items are compared: finite or infinite, odd or even, one or many, right or left, straight or crooked. But instead of applying this dualism to values-neutral geometry, as Pythagoras

3

had, Aristotle applied this dualism to people, animals, and society. By doing so, he socially engineered a hierarchical and divisive polarity that was rooted in his internal values and biases against others: the items he ordained to have more worth became 1s, and those of lesser importance 0s.

THE OFFER & THE NEED A thought about an offer and a need. A need and an offer. A set of binaries that I have been concerned with for the past ten years or, more specifically, the institutional offer and an individual need.

And also, the institutional need and an offer of an individual.

I am concerned with this binary, for I believe it is the root of our current stagnant art and cultural infrastructure, spanning across borders and continents, in the North, the global South, the far East, and for sure in the whole of the Western hemisphere.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? My belief is that in the art world, including every dominant supporting pillar of it (the international institutions supporting national policies of cultural and art institutions, the national funding bodies, the arts councils, the art fairs, the philanthropic foundations, the art academies and art management educational institutions, the festivals and biennales, the commissioning and presenting institutions, and those that support research through devices such as residencies and fellowships), we all propagate, in more or less rigid ways, the dualistic philosophy of Aristotle, a proposition that is almost 2,500 years old.

So, what’s the problem? My thought is that the issue lies in the duality of the offer and the need. To say it more directly, I believe we need a total “renovation” of our institutional values. We need to break out of the dualism trap, and explore other paths instead.

Truly, even a crossroad would be a step up from the grueling road fork that only presents us with two directions to go in, left or right.

Accepting the offer, or not.

4

What I propose is that we all stop making offers for a little while.

No more offers of commissions, or shows, or residencies, or fellowships, or pots of cash, unless they come with unrestricted use of the offered resources. No more audience development programs. No more emerging artist development programs. Instead, what I propose is claiming more and more time, the most time we can stow away, to ask questions of what is needed. What do you need? What do you need right now as an artist? What do you need right now as a curator? What do you need as a student? What do you need as a single-parent student or artist? And so on. I am convinced that this path, practiced vigorously, individually and institutionally, would propose a clear direction even to the most stagnant of our international, national, and local institutions of culture, art, and education.

BECOMING ROOM, BECOMING MAC In 2018, I was invited by Mr. Papadimitriou, the President of the Onassis Foundation, and Ms. Afroditi Panagiotakou, Director of Culture, to design a new residency program in Athens. I am truly thankful for the trust that Mr. Papadimitriou, Ms. Panagiotakou, and the Board of Directors of the Onassis Foundation have put into what has become Onassis AiR. The first thing that came to my mind was that simple game I played with Peter Stamer. And then there were other thoughts and ideas by peers that have impacted the way I am, such as PAF1 (started by Jan Ritsema many years ago in St Erme) and Massia2 (in Massiaru, a village in Häädemeeste Parish, in southwestern Estonia); the text that Sarah Vanhee (2020) read aloud in a room full of her peers at the Art Center BUDA in Kortrijk in 2017, during the symposium “The Return of the Fantastic Institution”, organized by the brilliant curator Agnes Quackels; The Mountain School of Arts3 located above a Chinese restaurant in a tiny room looking like a bar in Los Angeles; but perhaps above all was 1. www.pa-f.net 2. www.massia.ee 3. www.themountainschoolofarts.org

5

the influence of a text by choreographer Eleanor Bauer (2008), “Becoming Room, Becoming Mac.”4 The reason this text has made such an impact on me, besides the obvious fact that Eleanor’s thoughts are so clear and intensely sincere, was the fact that everything she thought, felt, and wrote about in 2007 was still exactly the same in 2018, and it remains exactly the same in 2021. This was a shocking realization and every day when I thought, wrote, designed what would become the future house and program of Onassis AiR, I began my day by reading Eleanor’s text and checking any idea I had against it. It became the metrics, a proof of concept, and I am very grateful to Eleanor for sharing her thoughts and text.

A HOUSE THAT BECAME A HOME After months of working, I invited roughly 50 people from the Athenian and international artistic community to a very concentrated feedback session, moderated by another person who transformed me into who I am today, both my mentor and my friend, the curator and educator Barbara Van Lindt.

Onassis AiR5 was born on the 2nd floor of a neoclassical building, in the center of Athens, on a quiet street behind the Acropolis, in September 2019.

The space, the rooms, the kitchen, the terrace, were empty container spaces. Freshly painted, with striking wooden floors and high ceilings, but empty. The first time we met in the house with the first group of participants, we all sat on the floor, for there was nowhere else to sit. That day became one of the most cathartic moments of the past two years for me. I am humbled by the trust of those humans who sat on that floor, on a hot summer day of 2019. I am thankful to them for allowing me and Nefeli Myrodia 4. A preliminary version of this text was first given as a lecture within B-Chronicles, a discursive event around mobilities and subjectivities in the dance community presented by Sarma and Damaged Goods in the Performatik series at Kaaistudios, in Brussels on the 13th of January 2007.

5. www.onassis.org/initiatives/onassis-future/residencies/onassis-air

6

(the dramaturg and creative producer of Onassis AiR) to attempt another functionality of an institution. Their willingness to begin from null allowed us all to experiment with the boundaries of the offer and the need, between an institutional safety offered and the self-organized becoming of what Onassis AiR now is.

(ONE) PROOF OF CONCEPT It is fun and extremely rewarding to think abstractly about institutional complicity, self-organization, reversing the status quo, and many other confines of how our society functions today. Onassis AiR has become a very small, micro-platform to test out assumptions about reversing the binary duality of the offer and the need.

EMPTY CONTAINER If a new institution, a new space is born without any existing infrastructure, who should decide what such infrastructure should entail? From the first days we asked: What do you (the participants) need to make this empty container useful for you right now? It was extremely fun to see this house become a space for research and communal existence. And we all did it with passion. But where is the boundary of what can be asked of an artist? Is there such a boundary? Of course, in a truly self-organized or artist-run space, this question is not necessary. But what happens in a more nebulous, institutional space that hands over the decision-making power of what it shall be or look like to its participants? Is it fair? Is handing over the infrastructural decision making to artists and participants creating a Trojan horse in the guise of a question of “what do you need, you know better, so make this new institution look and feel and function in the most useful way for you.” Is such a question yet another institutional offer with a guise of an invitation?

SHOW ME THE € $ £ I have heard many artists express their desire to have much more decision-making power into how institutional funds are allocated.

7

I used to be one of those artists. So, what happens if an institution hands over its infrastructural and programming budget to the participants?

This has become a very pragmatic exercise with each group of participants at Onassis AiR. We have tried such a transfer of governance power in various ways, on various scales. From truly putting the whole budget we have on a flip chart and saying that now this is all yours. You decide how and on what this money gets spent.

And to be rigorous with the intricacy of Onassis AiR (institutional funding combined with the aspiration of self-organized governance), we were always clear that any funds not used by the end of the year would be returned to the operational budget of the Onassis Foundation. Other ways have been tried. Separating the operational budget from program budget and asking the participants to collectively decide how the program budget should be spent, on what, with who, with what criteria.

And, again and again, what we experienced more than anything from all groups of participants, to a lesser or greater degree, was guilt. The death of all discovery and change. Guilt was present in every constellation when unrestricted use of funding became a possibility. Guilt of privilege, of racial inequalities, guilt of demographics. We have tried decreasing the budget handed over to the participants, in the hope to diffuse the level of responsibility, and have explored many institutional loopholes of how to be fiscally responsible and abide by our institution’s legal and accounting protocols, while at the same time assuring the greatest level of flexibility for how and when the collectively managed program budgets could be spent.

The bottom line: money is complicated. When dealing with money in an analogue version of DAO,6 money is very complicated indeed.

6. The DAO (stylized ) was a digital decentralized autonomous organization, which was stateless and not tied to any particular nation state (“The DAO (organization),” 2021).

8

EEST Another assumption that was made had to do with time.

Doesn’t everyone keep saying, “I need to find the time for …”?

Unstructured time, leisure time, time for yourself, reflection time, time to learn, time to think, time to read, time is the omnipresent holy grail we all desperately seek to guard for ourselves.

What has surprised me very much is that the assumption that all artists would appreciate and take pleasure in more time for themselves is not that correct of an assumption.

The groups of participants whose time we structured and facilitated and curated seemed to revel in the plethoric information (workshops, guests, on-site visits, screenings, open days, feedback sessions, artist studio visits, etc.) we organized in the first months of Onassis AiR. But, to my surprise, when time is safeguarded and provided as an assumed resource, without much structure or expectation of how such time must be filled, it creates a rift in collective research and learning environments. Some people feel guilty, some bored, some cannot understand the purpose of just being or what is expected of them, even when nothing is expected.

So once again, offering, even time, is not a very straight forward institutional practice. Perhaps asking what kind of time you need would be more radical?

Asking. We must remember to ask!

WHO WE ARE One experiment we have implemented from the beginning seems to have become our success.

The peer-to-peer selection: a perpetually tweaked process, informed by all the feedback we receive from applicants as well as past participants. For each open call we have released, the selection is done by the previous participants of the program.

The logic: If this house and program is built by those who use

9

it, and if the ethos of this house and program is to refrain from stop-and-shop support (i.e. all past participants of the program are always welcome back), then who else knows better who “fits into” this peculiar program than the past participants?

The lessons we learned: blind selection, few (or preferably one) question(s), ability to answer those few questions in any medium or way an applicant prefers (not everyone thinks and communicates in words), no meddling with the selection short-list.

Conclusion: Take away who knows who, take away CVs, portfolios, work samples. Anything that tells the selection teams anything about the applicant except the bottom line—one question: “Why do you need to be part of this program right now in your life and artistic or other practice, and why is it urgent for you right now?”

And equally important—ask two people (past participants) to review each application separately, without discussing it with each other, and if they disagree, respect the disagreement, and interview the applicant.

So far, our past participants come from the most diverse backgrounds (geographical, area of artistic and other practices, class, education, age, etc.).

GATHERED TOGETHER Today is August 24, 2021. Today I am sitting in the empty house of Onassis AiR, excited and nervous as usual, impatient to meet the participants of Movement V of The School of Infinite Rehearsals (2021/22).7 Today, coincidentally, is also a monumental anniversary for me. That of leaving the place I was born in. The largest “modern” country that no longer exists. I left the USSR, the city of Kiev on August 24, 1991. That departure surely transformed me into who I am today. Nevertheless, the preceding years of my adolescence in the USSR also made me perpetually aspire, admire, and desire collectivity.

7. That is, Nuno Cassola, Joseph Lubitz, Harry Isra Muhammad,

10

But certainly, being together, and even more so, deciding together, is not an easy practice. If no protocols are proposed to a group of participants, no formula—democratic, consensus, majority, anonymous—, then the biggest challenge is not to decide but to create the conditions, the common values, the common ethics (and aesthetics), to be able to decide based on those values or principles.

And it requires each individual to be fragile, to know how to listen, to agree to disagree, to know when to stand your ground, to have emotional intelligence, empathy, to be able to back up your opinions with intelligent arguments, and more than anything, to want to put in the work.

This process takes time. What does it mean in a temporal community of peers? The process of communal decision making cannot be rushed. The process needs to be respected and everyone has the right to take more or less time evaluating and sensing on what basis a collective decision feels right to them.

FULL CIRCLE In the summer of 2022, I will depart from my current role of the director of Onassis AiR. This plan was always in place, from the first days. The reason is simple: I believe that to sincerely see this institutional experiment through, the one with the longest memory of what it was in the beginning must leave the house. To empower the current community of this program to truly imagine and govern (conceptually, infrastructurally, logistically) the future of how Onassis AiR could be, should be, and hopefully will be, it is necessary for my body, mind, and sensibilities to not have any influence on the future of this decentralized community of peers who have all met in this house.

From September 2021, we will begin an intentionally slow process.

The first part will have a “city council meeting” format—a regular physical and online (for those who are not in Athens) monthly forum where anyone from the Onassis AiR community can join if they wish to develop the future of this program and space.

11

The goal is to start from scratch. To look at the functionality of this program, the conceptual framework, the operational and financial particularity of how Onassis AiR functions in between an institution that enables it infrastructurally (the Onassis Foundation) and the self-organized and peer-to-peer governance structure we hope to create with the whole community in the coming year. We need to collectively ask questions like “what is Onassis AiR needed for,” “who needs it,” and “what does it need to do or not do to enable such needs.” The emphasis is on being true to the initial DNA we created for this program—take meeting and being with others seriously. That means it takes time to truly meet one another. And if we extend this to institutional support, this translates to support which cannot be fleeing and momentary. The question of “what do you need” must be asked over time to the growing community of practitioners that Onassis AiR supports and will continue to support.

The School of Infinite Rehearsals (2020/21),8 each book written collectively by the participants of Movements I-IV. Each book was edited by an editor who took part as a participant themselves, with an enormous task of compiling the collective research of the respective Movement group they took part in. Each book was designed by another Athenian design team. And the box in which these books reside was designed collectively by all four design teams. I truly hope you will be able to feel the energy of all our bodies in these books.

The second restructuring part will begin in Spring 2022, with more concentrated work groups composed of past participants (i.e. the community of past participants), our collaborators, skeptical peers who question some aspect of this program, and colleagues from other places whose perspective we collectively find necessary to have during this re-imagining process. The work groups will explore with more precision and depth the outcomes and ideas of the first re-imagining process—the monthly community meetings.

Harris, W. (1987). The Infinite Rehearsal. Faber & Faber.

REFERENCES Bauer, E. (2008). Becoming Room, Becoming Mac. Movement Research Performance Journal, (32), 29–31.

Liu, T. (2019, January 18). Aristotle’s binary philosophies created today’s AI bias. QUARTZ. https://qz.com/1515889/aristotles-binary-philosophies-created-todaysai-bias/ The DAO (organization). (2021, September 24). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) Vanhee, S. (2020). The Fantastic Institutions. Flanders Art Institute. www.kunsten.be/en/now-in-the-arts/the-fantastic-institutions/

And finally, in Fall 2022, anyone from our community (past participants) who express interest to be involved in the governance of the future Onassis AiR program will collectively conceptualize and release the first Open Call (2023/2024) of the re-imagined Onassis AiR program and possibly re-imagined house we all met in.

WHAT’S INSIDE The four publications in the box you hold in your hands comprise the unfiltered thoughts of all participants of the first year of

12

8. The title of this program is inspired by a book introduced to us by a brilliant performance theorist and convener of the first two Movements (Movement I & II) of The School of Infinite Rehearsals (2020/21), Hypatia Vourloumis— Wilson Harris’ The Infinite Rehearsal (1987).

13

COLOPHON Texts Ash Bulayev, Nefeli Myrodia

Published by Onassis Foundation

Design Stathis Mitropoulos

Publication Coordination Ash Bulayev, Nefeli Myrodia

Proofreading Aliki Theodosiou

Content Manager Christina Kosmoglou Production Yiannis Alexandropoulos Distribution Consultant Ilan Manouach Printing Alta Grafico SA

ISBN 978-618-85361-3-5

This book is part of the boxed set titled and cannot be sold separately.

Printed in Athens, in September 2021, in 1300 copies for the Onassis Foundation. © 2021 Onassis Foundation © the authors All rights reserved.