2020 THE MARKET

Movement study for THE MARKET is a performance that is part of a social sculpture series of Fernando Belfiore that includes THE CAVE and THE FOUNTAIN.

THE MARKET – ITA Julidans Photo by Thiemi Higashi

Mavi Veloso & Isadora Tomasi & Fernando Belfiore & Nicolás Rosés & Maciej Sado & Rose Akras

The project has an interdisciplinary approach investigating consumerism, the ‘ruling’ of large corporations, and the accumulation of wealth. From the 2008 financial crisis that made inequality worst to current Covid-19 exposing new forms for the mutant ideologic virus of fascism. This dance practice works on counts: nearly 41⁄2 billion people, all over the world, earn less than three dollars a day as the racial wealth gap also continues, the world’s richest 1% own as twice as much as the bottom 90%

[…] practices are not unilaterally determined by the habitus; they emerge at the site of conjuncture between the habitus and what Bourdieu will call specific social “fields” where the ultimate or ultimately determining field is “the market”. Performativity’s Social Magic. Judith Butler

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art. Toni Morrison

The continued spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also unleashed large epidemics of ideological viruses that were dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoid conspiracy theories, explosions of racism. But perhaps another ideological virus, and much more beneficial, will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternative society, a society beyond the nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of solidarity. and global cooperation the coronavirus will also force us to reinvent communism based on trust in people and in science. Slavoj Žižek

Beuys, the author of Kunst=Kapital, has been planting Oak trees, a long-term and large-scale artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of enduringly altering the living space of the city; but, what can “planting” do nowadays to alter the scope of social inequality and state of indifference? What are the seeds, ideas and acts that can produce radical change ? In times of social distancing we want to get ever closer and involved. Empathy. Care. Distribution. Time for each other instead of frantic production and expansion. Some of us experience that it is possible to work from homes, that universal basic income is possible, that measures can be taken so that less CO2 emission, that global action is possible. Radical change is needed. Who owns and sells the oil that is taken out of the

Earth? During the pandemic of 2020, we faced a time of changes. A call for care and also reflection with practices of isolation and changes in the habits of touching each other.

During 2019, Slavoj Žižek had stated that The continued spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also unleashed large epidemics of ideological viruses that were dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoid conspiracy theories, explosions of racism. But perhaps another ideological virus, and much more beneficial, will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternative society, a society beyond the nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of solidarity. and global cooperation the coronavirus will also force us to reinvent communism based on trust in people and in science. This work is born in the environment and the thought of radical change. It is an investigation where the arts meet the economy. Where we want to use the momentum of shaping new ideas, reflection and movement towards a sustainable and just world.

This research is to bridge aesthetics and political action while laying possible acts toward a sustainable and ecosocialist future. Inspired in the book of the Brasilian Michael Lowy, Ecosocialism, A radical alternative to capitalist catastrophe, which proposes a revision on our, not only current modes of consumption but also production, and recalls, for utopia as indispensable to social change. Lowe says “Both socialism and ecology appeals to qualitative values – for the socialists use value, the satisfaction of needs, social equality; for the ecologists, protecting nature and ecological balance. Both conceive economy as ”embedded” in the environment – a social environment or a natural environment.”

This interdisciplinary work plays with live sound, painting, installation, acting and choreographic practices. In the first version of the work, No volveremos a la normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema, inspired in the projection of the visual artist Matías Segura at a building facade in Chile during Santiago’s protests in October against facism, privatisation and inequality. We started collecting texts that we say and claim as a manifest during the performances. The name of this project is is also Movement Study for the Market.

In State of Insecurity, Government of precarious by Isabell Lorey she states that Individualization and segmentation increase, not least of all due to post-fordist working conditions, which demand permanent availability while cutting labour rights and social rights at the same time. The capacity for caring for others becomes scarce, self-care serves almost exclusively to re-produce a profitable and productive body. This works proposes a collective action of performance, a mutual common works redefining public and public space. With use of texts to strengthen the research but also during the performance as manifests of our voices. We aim with our creative and artistic aesthetic choices to bring movement for thought. In this work we as a communion collective, sharing different functions on the stage being witnessed by the audience, strive for necessary and emergent radical alternatives to social imaginary, identity and economics. A dance that is shaped by collectivity care and critical thinking. We can be noise, We can be random, We can do strange things, we can have imaginary companions. We can think and act on today’s world!

No volveremos a la

normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema

or movement Study for THE MARKET

Markets were also important centres of social life. Today, markets can also be accessed electronically or on the internet through e-commerce platforms. In mainstream economics, the concept of a market is any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information. In the performance we focus on the work of Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. Jeff Bezos is the richest man on earth. Jeff Bezos will be our chosen investigatory space of the owner, of the contemporary ‘bourgeois’. The Modern French word bourgeois derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from BOURG (MARKET TOWN).

The Modern French word bourgeois (French: [buʁʒwa]; English: /ˈbʊərʒ.wɑː, ˌbʊərˈʒwɑː/) derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from bourg (market town). Besides describing the social class who owns the means of production, the Marxist use of the term “bourgeois” also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property. Besides describing the social class who owns the means of production, the Marxist use of the term “bourgeois” also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property. Two spatial constructs manifest the bourgeois mentality: (i) the shop-window display, and (ii) the sitting room.

In Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredic Jameson talks about a global cognitive mapping and this being a space of confusion. This concept supports my performative work from a theoretical frame. I would like to explore this place as con(with)-fusion, mixing, blending, allowing plurality to exist and borders to disappear, so that new negotiations can emerge, allowing social capital and non-binary thinking. Fredic Jameson says that ‘the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last […]’. Jameson goes further explaining that now we, as individuals, start to see our positions at the same time as collective subjects, instead of the former binary either/or way to see that relation. With that potentiality of being individuals and collective we regain our capacity to act and to struggle. Jameson goes further saying “The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”

Besides describing the social class who owns the means of production, the Marxist use of the term ‘bourgeois’ also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property (owning the means of production). To investigate this consuming/producing importance relating to markets and to our social life I will make use of the concept of overproduction. In The Communist Manifesto of 1848 (old, but not-outdated, extensively used and quoted but an important point of reference, and taboo text but still polemic due to the will to new theories that have been build upon after that), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. … It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the whole of bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part, not only of existing production, but also of previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, an epidemic breaks out, that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

I want to make use of this conceptual knowledge and further research to build not only this performance but a choreographic practice where a different script can be made, or different ones rather than an ongoing plot of inequality. Making movement as time-space value needs of self-knowledge and historical collective awareness. Where MOVEMENT STUDY can lead us to change and conocimiento. So that art and dance can review and propose change to expansion, progress and hegemonies created by the free market and capital and colonization.

Trans(per)Formative Acts or movement study for the markt

photo above and sequence bellow by Matija Lukic

Ecosocialism, A radical Alternative to Capitalism Catastrophe or Movement study for the market

Farming became more intensive and productive, allowing people to move from subsistence farming to the production of surpluses. This meant that communities could trade with neighbours with a different speciality. Critically, however, it also enabled them to support classes of people not specifically involved in food production – specialist craftsmen, religious officials, administrators, and rulers. Thus did the gap between rich and poor in society begin, non-producers becoming wealthy and the actual producers of the food on which everyone lived remaining poor. It was the beginning of civilization as we know it.

A Short History from Africa, From the Origins of the Human Race to the Arab Spring. Gordon Kerr

THE MARKET is born in the environment and the thought of radical change of economy. It is an investigation where performance arts meet economy, ecology, and sociology. I want to use the momentum of shaping new ideas, reflection, and movement towards a sustainable and just world. This research bridges aesthetics and political action while laying possible praxis toward a sustainable and ecosocialist future. Inspired by the book of the Brazilian Michael Lowy, Ecosocialism, A radical alternative to capitalist catastrophe, this work proposes a collective action of performance.

Gloria Anzaldúa, an U.S/Mexican border artist, talks about spiritual activism, a very political endeavour. Spiritual activism to bridge this historical moment that we live in with political-aesthetic issues such as nationalism, trauma, racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic oppression. In her publication Luz en lo Oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality, Gloria calls for conocimiento (expanded awareness, knowledge, consciousness, non-binary), to healing, to transform trauma into creative and social justice work, as well, the hybrid potential (the mix, the borders, and the place-in-between) and our own identity (trans)formation, and ability to forge alliances with other groups, cutting the separations and divisions, the us/them.