When I rebuilt my artistic practice some years ago, one of the striking things I had to adjust to, was how it opened me up to have stronger intuitions of the near future. This was deeply unsettling at first, troubling my belief in an open future, the sense that we are participating in the creative unfolding of the yet to come. But over time it also gave rise to a renewed sense of what it might mean to belong to time and to creative becoming. It also directed all attention -once again- to the radical, creative potential of a thick present. By which I mean the full breadth of material, temporal rhythms, attunements and imaginations as they entangle together.
What follows is an attempt to share some of the speculative insights I find my practice has been teaching. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s evocative use of Virgina Woolf’s Think We Must! I go on to do the same.
Think we must! Artistic Practice teaches a different way of relating to the given and the otherwise.
Think we must! Artistic practice teaches about surrendering to what is other, to what wants to speak through you, to what is not yet known. Paradoxically it teaches how trust and patience allow the future to set in unexpectedly.
Think we must! Artistic practice as a way to nurture radical belonging: to see ourselves as creative beings in a complex, interconnected doing-with and becoming-with.
Think we must! Artistic agency as something that resides in all of us, outside and beyond us.
Think we must! Artistic practice as a way to provoke, disrupt and unsettle, while at the same time opening us up to what is intimately known yet wildly unknowable.
Think we must! Artistic practice as inherently relational and alter-political.
Think we must! Artistic practice as a gentle yet radical form of resistance.
Dance we must! So we may find the cracks and strengthen resonating voices of difference
Dance we must! So we can share our grief and rage
Dance we must! The radical potential of artistic practice lies in its ability to dance with the trouble and invite the future in: a future-past-present which is otherwise left unattended.
