 Tu vas avec Parnon, oui. Allô ? Good afternoon. We're just about to begin the last block or session of our two-day symposium. Thank you for sticking with us. So, now I'm thrilled, excited to welcome Lorraine Basque and Rashid Uramdan, both artists working respectively in New York, Philly, New York on the east coast and Paris and elsewhere in France I mean in many places but based in Paris at the moment I guess I just wanted to say that Rashid and Lorraine have actually never met I wanted to make that public a public statement just to, because you know the three other dialogues or provocations we've had so far kind of exposed a lot of intimacy or you know long relationships and this will be a different experience for you both so I want to thank you for engaging in that and also to say that I think if we want to jump in if you have questions or comments these will be welcomed as well so anyway maybe the second thing I want to say is that it was a little prompt for this exchange about the question of infrastructure or thinking from an artist perspective or your work in artistic fields how you approach the question of creating relationships, networks working in institutions or across institutions so that was part of the prompt so I wanted to also share it with you out there thank you I want to start sure I could start hello again nice to meet you Lorraine thank you Noemi for this introduction and prompt so I wrote some notes and I will say I'm going to make my way to the question of infrastructure but I feel there are a few words that I have to speak before I could say other words and I'm kind of inspired today by by Audre Lorde who challenges us to transform silence into language and action and also by Dorothea's invocation earlier when she reminded us of 1994 and the beginning of the Rwandan genocide and she said what were people doing so the words that I have to say are ceasefire now end the occupation free Palestine and I speak these words in chorus with many others and I speak them so that they might continue to ignite a chorus that is louder than we could imagine until Palestine is free and I want to situate them now on this question of infrastructure because I don't speak them lightly but with the urgency of this catastrophic ethical moment infrastructure is the work that keeps things going and I'm sure we've all been involved in the infrastructures of keeping dance going in studios in theaters in universities sometimes infrastructure are also the ways we organize with each other to interrupt business as usual or to interrupt the flow of things as they already are and we're seeing these interruptions right now so last night I sat in the sanctuary of St. Mark's church where Dance Space Project is where I've performed and so many others here have performed where I've seen so many work I sat there in an event hosted by the poetry project called Poets for Palestine and 600 people registered for this event around more than 500 people were in the sanctuary I wanted to share that I hadn't had this experience entering Dance Space entering St. Mark's church entering the Poetry Project before where the Poetry Project had actually received so many threats for hosting this event that they needed to hire security so for all of us to enter the building for a poetry reading we were padded down and our bags were checked to make sure that our presence would not occur I also read today that David Velasco the editor of Art Forum who is a writer of Dance a thinker with Dance a lover of Dance was fired from his position as editor-in-chief at Art Forum because Art Forum circulated a letter of thousands of artists calling for a ceasefire and standing with the Palestinian people so I say this to just kind of situate myself in like these very hostile this very hostile moment this moment that like as the poet Benjamin Krusling said last night we have to make the world safe for life the world is not safe for life right now and it touches us here like it really does and this hostility of institutions of the kind of state violence that creeps into institutions it's not distributed it's not distributed evenly so I'm now okay very very big very very catastrophic but we try I try to say like yes I take up this task with all of you how to continue to make the world as Ben Krusling said to make the world safe for human life and part of that is infrastructure like we work together to produce other kinds of environments for performance for Dance for the collective study that performance invites us into so now I will humbly shift no maybe just pause there maybe I'll pause there first I apologize for my English sometimes I even wonder myself if I understand everything you just say but I think so no but what you say made me think about the relation of domination that sometimes infrastructure can reproduce and I would say that at the moment the main focus for people who had the power to act in our infrastructure is to be sure that we don't reproduce the same that we don't reproduce the same references the same models it's easy to say because sometimes people are convinced that they are doing this but they don't even realize that they are so much involved in an infrastructure that works well that they don't see anymore the alternatives I would like to speak a bit of my experience as an artist not as a director but when I start to dance I studied in a school quite recognized school in French National Graphic Center of Angers I studied in New York a lot and I have all this post-modern heritage and I was working a lot in that field this field called modern dance and we are doing post-modern dance and we are doing performances and every time when I want and everything was really okay and I had the feeling that I had the right references everything was going well until a moment when the first golf war happened and suddenly all this that make rise a lot of debate between Western culture and Muslim culture much more than before because we had the conflict in Palestine from quite a long time but no one cared about it but when it became the war because of the oil in the Kuwait suddenly it was a matter for everyone and at that moment I just remember how my daily life I received my illiterate parents refugees from the Algerian War all that came back and I decided to do a project based on that and I googled probably because of my artistic background I first start with Western culture heritage and during this moment of war I just wanted to reinvestigate the representation of death on stage and I googled this title called The Young Men and the Deaths this piece of Roland Petit which was a hit after the Second World War and the hypertextuality of Google just gave me a lot of information everything that belongs to this artistic heritage and many other things the collective suicide on the web Marie Le Manson suspected to have influenced the teenagers the Columbine mass murders the young Muslim kamikaze and I did a project based on that and I don't know why but I really use a lot of oriental Arabic references Arabic music and even myself autobiographic fact for my childhood thinks that I never use and that I never think that it could be relevant in my work as a dancer and I also realize that when I start to speak with with the journalist with the press I start to say but you know you the French I was French and I never say that before but I started to say but you know you in France I grew up at a step in Algeria I grew up in France I don't even speak Arabic but I just realized that how during all those years this cultural heritage that I got my Algeria is from the French Alps in the suburb of the city how this was just smoother by a hyper well structured environment and I couldn't complain I was working with a lot of companies but and at that moment and I did a project also based on that later I learned later that my father had been tortured during the Algerian war and that created a silence I heard that you spoke about sorry I was not here the day before and I don't know what you have said I hope I will not repeat too many things but I also wanted to understand this silence because probably that this silence was part of the thing that was missing even if you are shaped by tabou there is still things that are part of you but that you don't ground your artistic approach on it and let's say that this became more and more clear every year and I would say that after all the saying I think that's now the main responsibility that I have not as an artist but as a director it's to be sure that our infrastructure don't reproduce dominant model because everything you mentioned was about domination of culture and in the next panel maybe we will explore more these details because I'm afraid to repeat myself but yeah I don't know if we are going somewhere but listening to you this morning yeah like if we want to speak about our infrastructure it's because it's easy to fight when you have a clear enemy it's I have worked with a lot about Dorothe she is one of the associated artists in Chaillot the theater I have in charge like many others and I remember to have worked with Gilbert Gatorre who is a Rwanda writer and I remember that he say that you know when you are a victim of someone that you understand the different opinion it's easy to be against to be in a conflict but when you don't even realize because everything is becoming implicit what I said before the strength of the reproduction of something because everything looks okay I think that's where it's important to analyze the infrastructure and to be sure that in this nice river we are sure that the current is not too strong and that we don't skip or the the different things the alternative way yeah I mean I I think also that's part of what kind of prompted me in 2019 in collaboration with others but to begin this project called the school for temporary liveness which really kind of came out of maybe like a frustration with the ways that we are so habituated in terms of our relationships to performance whether we are watching a performance in a theater even no matter how experimental it might be we kind of come to it with our habits of assembly as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney would say and then also in the university frustrated with like the limits of what could be kind of transmitted in a classroom around experimentation and so working and teaching at the school of dance at University of the Arts in Philadelphia with Donna Faye Birchfield who was here earlier with us we kind of dreamt up this idea to like have a school outside of school to kind of exit the university in a sense but we were still kind of tapping into its resources or legitimacy let's say to hack the resources of the university to create like a third space or a bridge space that would be temporary a temporary assembly around experimental performance that really ask what if when Nora Chippomire comes and presents and performs her trilogy that has toured all over in theaters all over how might we meet it differently if we're not meeting her as you know this kind of provocateur incredible performer which she is but if we meet her in the sense of you are studying and we are studying with you and the work for instance that work when it was presented and shared in the school for temporary liveness it felt quite different than it had felt when it was in like the kitchen in New York and that has to do with this kind of experimenting and how we meet each other and so I think yeah with the kind of continued iterations of this project the school for temporary liveness I've been trying to think what are the kind of like atmospheres that we can maybe project in order to be complicit with an artist experimentation complicit with blackness black performance complicit with queerness and queer performance like we are accomplices the institution or the theater does not represent an identity but we are working together to produce like a social kind of temporary collectivity and so the the institutions that we know that we love may know may only take us so far so really this kind of belief in experimentation with infrastructure is what kind of carries this project or carries my work but I wonder like how I know you are speaking later about the Shio but how as an artist in such a you know an institution that is really steeped in the city is steeped in histories of dance is steeped in a kind of bureaucracy like how do you how do you approach that work as an artist I would say it's an interesting thing just Shio was not laided by an artist those last years it was in the past but so as last 20 years 25 years it was not an artist and they wanted an artist to be back I don't know exactly why but there is probably different reason good reason but reason but no but I would say I can speak more technically after about Shio but still to try to be on this path between those different experiences of life of passing in the art world no I would say that I'm trying to think the infrastructure to serve the project of the artist and not to ask the artist to bring a project that I need in the institution because maybe you have speak about that but this market of art was so strong for many years and very efficient that create habits I recently meet artists and they say ok we did this new project we would like to present it in your venue etc which is totally valid and Shio is here for that but I think that's one more time those alternative paths that I was mentioning you have yeah I think it's important to always consider your structure even if it's concrete even if it's a Ardeco Palace with venue how we can support initially our artist in the entire process and often when you speak with the artist they don't speak only about their art pieces but much more the new dialogue they invent with different communities how they they go beyond the art world and I will give an example in the nine associated artists we have in Shio there is first time in Ecolar which is from Republic Democratic of Congo and he doesn't really want to do projects for stage or for museum at the moment he's much more involved on how to say making emerge citizen in Republic Democratic of Congo concern with cultural culture then it start in a very it means to develop a place for that and it start to create a place many years ago with partners called the Cabaco studio and at the moment but the model was tricky because first time was not enough in many countries then he's able to travel to perform to make money and to bring back the money to the country it's really the model of a lot of exiled people who go to work on the north and they send the money to the and it start to be in trouble I mean I don't want to reduce first time I'm sure you wouldn't understand what I'm saying now but because he critiques himself this way to behave then he say now what I need from Shio it's not to come to perform in the theater I need you to help me to produce drinkable water in Rwanda I can sell the water because there is a lot of firm who sell the water in a very high price because during many years the water had been polluted then they are able to produce water and to sell it in a cheaper price because they don't want to make a massive profit and with this benefit they can develop different program for the kids cultural program education program popular educations and then that's where he need us to support and Shio is this venue with different stage in Paris but I do believe as a national theater that the responsibility that Shio have with many other countries especially when there is a postcolonial then that's how I think this infrastructure should be because you are questioning then this is one example among many others to be sure that what I said before we just don't reproduce the same we don't reproduce the next show but we try to to put the seeds of this kind of initiative where art is relevant in social field in medical field in research, in education Yeah, that's it I don't know if it makes sense Any questions? No, you made me think about a project that we did when you were talking about the water with this amazing woman who started a charter school but she wanted to start a dance program what she did was cause we wanted to also deal with diabetes in the community so she connected the school with the hospital and this dance program what we did was bring the parents in on the weekends to do this work what we would like to teach about nutrition and the kids would choreograph but it was all the school was connected to the hospital and so this whole dance program changed the whole community but it was coming up with the idea of creating a dance program that was connected to the community, the hospital I really think that's well, Ali I don't know what I will say in the next panel but I'll go for it but yeah, I have the feeling that's still to think about the infrastructure that's again that's my later experience and that's why I'm trying to support I think that we have to act on the scale of the city and not on the scale of the art world and every in the past I worked with Victim of Torture we did projects about the possibility to speak after that but it was not not only with them not only with in the art world because when you start to work on such a subject with psychologists that protect the victims you have to work with different departments also I've done a project called Crossing the Night with what we call isolated minors like kids refugees alone in Europe in France and in every city where we arrived the project was to federate resources of the city because you have to work with the justice department you have to work with the school you have to work with the family that's for some of them adopt them for a while sorry for the word it's not adopt and that's the artwork this network of relation that you create in the city and how you make the demonstration every day that dance practices because I'm coming from dance but I could say art practices could have a value in all this domain and suddenly I remember judges lawyer saying oh you're right it's better that they spend some time with you instead of staying locked between them in the foyer where they have to wait waiting for if they are going to have official paper or not and just to have create that dynamic again I think that's where I always see our infrastructure as a transversal structure really art for itself I don't want to be provocative I hope I will not choke art for itself doesn't mean anything for me I know that people claim that and I can understand why in the history of art they have claimed that but I don't know I don't know but yeah that's it and this kind of initiative definitely that's where maybe are the new resources not the new resources because often when we say resources we say the new role cru role in English the role element of life of the real life become art elements and yeah yeah that's it I would just like maybe highlight attention or something I think about with infrastructure which maybe speaks something I said earlier about sometimes infrastructure with the city we think of the roads and the bridges and everything that allows us to get from one place to another and all the work it takes to maintain those hospital schools then these very same kind of infrastructural institutions also continue to harbor systems that reproduce domination to use your language so I think there's like this tension when we're thinking about infrastructure is when we're in these kinds of like entanglements what do we want to keep going and what do we want to disentangle because yes like dance and performance you know I was thinking this morning about the work of Julie Tolentino and this party that they organized in New York for ten years with a whole crew of queer women and dykes called the Clit Club and they were able to make the Clit Club happen this like space for people who were you know grieving from the AIDS crisis who were activists but who also needed to gather dance to kind of improvise and experiment with gender and sexuality and love and loss and she was able to make that space they were able to make that space because this whole part of the city was abandoned by the city like there was no infrastructure in the meatpacking district at that time it was abandoned and a choreographer's husband I think had you know Julie was a dancer a choreographer's husband had purchased the warehouse for like to have like jazz music something events and I don't think like that was really working or that like people were going to go to that and Julie was like well I know what we could do with the space we could we could have memorials we could have a party like no other party in the city and yeah that was possible because nothing else was there and you know eventually over the time that the party you know was happening for ten years like gentrification came in the police came in that whole part of the city changed but there was this like window where something could happen so I feel like there's this tension with working with what's already been built up but then also finding the gaps of where are the openings to produce what's needed in a kind of moment that is unlike any other moment or yeah yeah Ashley you are pointing Ashley right? okay hi Rashi thank you for bringing up Luen that's the piece that you were referencing earlier a little bit and I'd love to call the name of the work into the room because it feels deeply poignant at this moment so if you don't know it check it out and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about you know what I'm hearing is this relationality between individuals and their ideas infrastructures or lack thereof and Ashley you talked a little bit about what led you to make Luen I wonder if you could talk a little bit about if and how making that work shifted your relationship to larger infrastructures of company models making dances on many other bodies as opposed to that solo work that you performed from such a personal place and if there's a relationality there that you continued to hold or if it really does feel like a separate moment yeah then Luen is one of the project I mentioned just for you a brief speech about it then yeah following all those projects how does it start I did grab it I decided to follow the path that my father have done in what X Indochina which is Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia today that he did as a soldier because at that time Algeria was colonized and we were used to send colonized people to fight against colonized people to maintain the two colonies for the France and he was one of the persons who was doing that and then I wanted to to do a research of this French the traces the traces of this violence in this country because being there once someone told me oh but you know the French the S-Colonial people then I say yes I'm French but you know my parents etc we don't care but yeah how your identity is relative regarding the context in one I just yeah I just realize how much during this project one more time how much a culture was smothering another one then I will say the same thing the only way I had to to approach Vietnamese culture was by reading Duras French writer and when when I start to meet the people I remember at that time I met a captain from the commando army very close from Mochimil and I was really impressed because when I was interviewing him every time he was speaking about nice French poets, Rimbaud, Verlaine even like some texts that I didn't studied at school he was really high skill in French poetry and he told me we were fighting an occupant not a culture and this the diverse identity fraternal war conflictual feeling conflictual cultural cultural reference that we all have here because we are all part of something let's say that it's really something that I always have in mind especially now I cannot hear for me it's always difficult to hear nations also nations you know when we say the Israeli the Russian the Ukrainian like you always have when the war started in Ukraine as a national institution we all got I suppose Catherine was the same in CND we were all contacted to say you have to stop all the relations with Russian artists I mean I was in contact with transgenders artists I was people who wanted to escape from Russia then let's say that's definitely what I understood from all those artistic project it's that you always have a complexity you always have opposition in those countries and the worst thing it's to put them in the same bag and then that's it and it's I don't want to go too far about what's going on at the moment between Fama, Cezbollah, Liban Palestine, Israel but what is important it's to face this complexity and to never reduce someone to the nation that this person belongs to and that's maybe I don't know if you are going to speak about interculturality later but interculturality doesn't mean inter nations and that's all and if I try to finally a way to answer to the questions too long that's really the thing that's our nation belonging is just a part of our identity like our the gender our affective identity are so much more complex and they built us so much that's yeah that's definitely how I think infrastructure should be I I don't speak about the national dance theater even if it's an official label I pretend to do a theater of diversity and hospitality and after we see how we approach those two terms everyday I just wanted to bring up one other idea I lived in the Middle East for six years NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center and I wanted to just bring up the idea of infrastructure as privilege and the curiosity and opportunity that I had to use the infrastructure as a safe haven for dance artists, queer artists and having the privilege of meeting artists who risk their lives to do dance in their home country or as queer artists and curious for those of us that have the privilege to be around infrastructure if we can use that but it's not a western idea and the longer I live there the more I realize that the more western ideas we have about being out and being open about many things, many people across the world don't have that privilege and so how can we in our conversations make sure that we're not putting judgment on a pathway but as recognizing that we're all having to negotiate those things in our own spaces I think I would just say briefly in response that I don't know if it's quite a response but what comes up for me is constantly being attuned to what is the structure or network or web of power that's in play at this particular moment in this particular place and I just think that's what's kind of like informing anything I would say today is like being like okay what's happening with power right now and constantly having to kind of study that because it's changing at every moment and it's not ever fixed Thank you I just have one small maybe it's not small the okay so when you think of these radical ideas and the concepts of infrastructure and shifting them and shifting the modalities of them you're also dealing with these other larger power structures of support and I'm curious what strategies what thoughts, what dialogues are you having to help change the minds of others or to enlighten or whether there's any realization that there is a need to reimagine what that object of art is or how it manifests and how we can translate where the waters flow and how the waters flow I mean what can I say I think that without thinking about infrastructure is that I feel like I think about I talked about a party but it's like a flyer that gets passed around or something it's like a rumor it's like the work that we do when we're kind of exchanging things between our hands it brings us back to the material scale of working together to make something happen and so I often also think that you put out the kind of invitation to experiment let's say the people will come like the poetry project put out poets for Palestine and 600 people came you know like when a need is there then the people will come and actually we all have so much to kind of give each other in those moments so I think that it's it's only in that kind of like hand to hand passing of information that we start to shift the waters that we start to shift the kind of institutional flows of power because we have to put pressure on institutions to change from underneath from underneath and when I kind of work with artists and something like school for temporary liveness my approach is not to say is not to kind of structure their work or say make your work fit the school it's to say no your work already is a whole school like your work already has all this kind of pedagogy within it and it already has so much to kind of teach us how in the ways that we kind of meet each other outside of the structures that we already know can something else happen can people gather in a different way around it and so I think I'm trying to always like trust that we already have everything we need but there are structures that prevent us from accessing it or sharing it or redistributing it and so I don't know what it's like to run like a major institution or something like that like I just know how to be like we have this room we have this like $2,000 like what can we do together what do we need so that's kind of the approach that I'm working with I hope I understand you and David but you know working with those extreme athletes in the project we are having at the moment I'm always working with people who will and I think it's what I understand from them every day they demonstrate to other people that we are wider than when we think if you take the time to really work on yourself and I think that the same for the institutions I would say I don't know if Catherine because we have the two dance national institutions we have the two national institutions but actually because often we say institution and there is this movement like if it's heavy it could be very light those kind of national institutions we can behave the same way you have space and then you can do what you want with the space there is there is things yeah yeah but I like to play this way when I have all those official things that you have to but yeah there is always a way to play with that you know I like this French expression we are we are here for a mission service public service public mission we are here for a service with our power it's to serve and that's why we got the tip the tip of the waiters yeah of course there is pressure but I think that we are not so far away from the target that the people ask us to reach which are very wide inclusion to be sure that culture reach people that are not in contact with like and then there is many many way to do it and but it's maybe I'm going back to what I said before there is a model the strengths of the model sometimes you don't even think in another way but there is a lot of possibility to gather together other infrastructure and I think that's the only way because if you do the thing alone with your institution you will not transform anything because it's what I said before me in Paris for example and in Chaillot if I cannot work with Andy if we don't find in a kind of global ecosystem about who is doing what we have a collective responsibility but it's true that we are not all in this philosophy some are very competitive some are really but we have this collective responsibility to share our practices and just to be inspired about all this cooperation that we can do there is this phrase of Mark Twain that I'm always using I didn't know it was impossible I did it then it's a bit the same we should not think that those institutions are heavy no take it as a toy and shake it and go deeply in inclusive practices and create safe zone if there is not enough in Paris just play with it and share that with other institutions and I think the main goal is to go to this service for communities artists communities but also all the others and when you are on that field I think that's I mean so far it was not a big deal to federate people thank you thank you thank you I feel it's my responsibility to bring us to an end here but I want to thank you both for sharing and engaging and complexity yeah amazing so we will gather at what 2.15 is that possible what time is it now yeah 2.15 for the last session so we just have a few minutes to drink c'est bon