Georg Hobmeier’s workshop με τίτλο «Revolting Bodies: Insubordinance and Unreadability for public spaces» at Kinitiras Studio during the programme Artists in crisis.


*Georg Hobmeier* is the first resident artist of Kinitiras Studio for season 2012-13 (27/10 – 5/11). He returns for the second time in our country for one more collaboration with Kinitiras.

Europe is in turmoil. The struggle between citizens and authorities throughout the so called first world countries has reached a new level of emotionality and polarisation. The middle and working classes can and will not longer suffer for the failures made in high finances and by their political allies. These conflicts have reached the streets and demonstrations are yet again a common way of articulating protest and discontent with the political systems.

However, most protests are well within civil rules. Apart from the usual deviant groups, the struggle is peaceful and even the protesters that ressort to violence do that in restricted ways and without ressorting to actual militant strategies as implied in armed civil war conflicts. This is not a strategical conflict (yet), but a public ritual of emotional discontent directed against the authorities. Sometimes these events tend to be repeated in periodical ways or become permanent protest camps. But the idea remains: the citizens protest and these protest are meant to be at least acknowledged. Despite the fact that this is a deviation from the regular everyday life, the codification of communication and behaviour is clear. However over the recent years artists and anarchists have started to use techniques of confusion and performativity in public protests for various reasons. Art as activism is not a new invention. The dadaists riding their horses through the communists’ uprising in Berlin, the lettrists declaring the death of god in heart of the Catholic Church during High Easter mess and lately the Yes Men infiltrating corporate meetings, the borders between art and protest are blurred.

In Revolting Bodies, we aim to research the possibilities of public physical action in civil unrest and the traditional forms of protest. Since this is only a short research process followed by an even shorter workshop for interested participants from the performing art, we will focus on discussions, exchange of information and a limited amount of experimentation. We are interested to use own strategies to expand the standards of protests, to infiltrate this ritualt of discontent and to interfere with the existing codes. The tools remain yet to be determined, but we vaguely call them performative. That may well be adding nonlinear and nonlogical forms of narration to the protest ritual or the semiotic subversion of ongoing events, adding distortion that is being brought fourth through the body and it possibilities. We focus on a magic that creates more with less, therefore embracing minimal means. We could imagine using scores, tasks, commands, tracks, costumes, props, animals, choreographies, text, improvisation and whatever suits us and comes to us. We shall enjoy what we are doing and shall restrain ourselves from falling into ongoing ideological trapdoors and sandpits.

Our aim is to work for one week, in which we research, try out and reflect and then experiment with a broader group of interested people in the format of a 2 day workshop. More can and should not be said at this very point. For this is not about writing lenghty descriptions before an actual exchange between the participating individuals.

• By Ioanna Kampylafka, Georg Hobmeier and Synes Elischka.

Duration: 3 – 4 Νοεμβρίου
Time: 15.00-19.00
Fees: 50 euros