 So, I am Maria, an artist based in Lithuania, and my background is that I started in contemporary dance, and then shifted to clown, and then it was a big clash for me between contemporary arts and the clown work, so I call myself now conceptual clown. And yes, and now I'm a fresh mom as well. And I'm Andrea Salustri, I started as a street artist, then I transitioned to philosophy and then dance and choreography. I was supported by Circus Next as a laureate in 2019, I created a couple of works, and now I am doing object manipulations. So, you will hear a philosopher and clown talking about sustainability. But you don't know which one is which. So, we are here today to talk about sustainability in more than human circus. What is that? It's that we both with Andrea, we are, I don't know if we are obsessed or just normally interested into a rethinking relationship with non-humans. So, both of us objects, and now I expanded also to rethinking relationship to animals in circus and arts. Yes, maybe then we touch also what is an object, if there are human and non-human objects, and what else is to be defined and identified as an object. But let's start sharing a little bit of our practices and how we encounter the question of sustainability in our practices. Yeah, let's have a nice photo to start with. Yes, so this is me under the sofa, and I think that's my starting point where I encountered the feeling and relationship to sustainability. So, I think six years ago more or less I started questioning what's my artistic voice, what's my artistic pleasure, what do I want to do for real, and I found out that my favorite thing to do is nothing. It was also before Corona times, so I was really overwhelmed and thinking about all the global crisis, it made me feel like, oh my God. And then if I stop and pause it's still also so much of happening that I started compared to myself to an object more specific to a sofa. So, I used to say I'm like cozy, cute, comfy, but so heavy and ignorant. So, I do believe there are some people who are also like in the question of sustainability, feeling like, oh, I'm relaxed and enjoying my life, but there is this side of ignorance, which is not totally bad, bad, it's also good. So, we will talk it more. But of course nothing is not really possible to do, I try to do it. It's impossible, so this is kind of a circus for me, but later on I started developing this and I started to have to do something. So, I started actually making shows for objects, first sofas, then more objects, and then later on it shifted to animals as well. But I didn't perform for animals, I invited ducks to perform for humans. This is my practice. Cool. Yeah, very cool. I encountered the question of sustainability working with polystyrene, because the first big creation I did is called materia, and it's an exploration of this. You can show also your photo. I can pass the sofa and arrive to polystyrene. So, what I do is a performance of in between choreography and object manipulation that explores the possibility of this material. But in the process of making this show, I was wasting a lot of polystyrene, which is not a good thing. So, the question, what do I do with this waste came very strongly inside of the creation process. And I started looking for strategies. The first strategy was to start creating some artworks, arguably, with the waste. So, in order to perform the show, I need to have a perfect shape to polystyrene, as perfect as it can be. It's a beautiful polystyrene. And when it's missing a corner or something like this, unfortunately, it cannot go on stage the magic with an actor. So, these fairly good pieces became this kind of artworks. And it's a growing series that is sometimes touring in connection with the show. There is an exhibition. The series is called Toxic Landscapes, and I manipulate them and I paint on them. And I really use the polystyrene as a canvas. And we have a brief parenthesis, because Maria and I, actually, first of all, we met in Circo Strad event in Kaunas last year, which is really nice now to be back. But also, Maria made a reformulation of materia. She made materia 2.0. It's a very sustainable way to make circus. You recycle someone else's performance. Super sustainable. And it's very cool. So, I recently made a film inspired by Andrea's work for polystyrene. So, polystyrene is the audience. It's serious. It's really happening, this project. Yes. And this happened thanks to the support of a platform called The Sphere, in which we are both inside. And you will hear about it, I think, a little bit later on from Ulle. Yeah. And so, what did we do? This series of artworks grew into kinetic installation and more. And we made an exhibition together recently in Kaunas. Everything is happening in Kaunas. It's the place to be. Here are some pictures. So, yes, as a sustainability strategy, this was the first approach that I did. I tried to transform the waste into artworks. Was it enough? Clearly not. We can expand. Yes. Yeah, about practices. Yeah. Just one second. Polystyrene recycling. Yes. So, what I wanted to say is that I had a lot of fragments beyond the semi-good panels. So, I went on the best place to find information nowadays, the internet. And on the internet, I found out that there are worms that can eat plastics, specifically polystyrene. That was really cool. There were a bunch of kids from high schools in the U.S. doing science projects. They are the best researchers ever. And also some surfboard companies that were using the strategies. So, I found out that there are these beautiful disgusting little thingy that can actually eat polystyrene. And it's super interesting. They are called the Doppelbast Morio. Commonly known, and you can Google these super worms. You will find them. And it's actually a very recent thing. The first Santicific paper about them came last year in June from the University of Queensland that proves that they can only process polystyrene, but they can live on a diet based on soul polystyrene and they gain mass. So, they can really feed out of only polystyrene plus hydration. It's very important hydration. Yes, as a little example of how this sustainability question affected my practice and transformed my plastics, then I started making a little artwork with this polystyrene. So, in this installation we've made together, thanks to the support of this sphere, I made a little dollhouse for the worms to be destroyed during the course of the festival. So, it was there, they were eating the polystyrene, their own little house, and there was a contact microphone and you could hear them crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. And yes, they were also touring with me around to get there. So, this is how I encountered first the problem. But now, as you were saying, we got a bit more deep into the practices. Yes, very deep into maybe sofas again. Yes, so in this photo you see how my show functions because there are no object festivals and I still really enjoy being with humans and it's my way of surviving as well. I have to go to human festivals. So, even though I do it for sofas, people come in and I need to deal with them. And it's really challenging. It is problematic, the object and the human relationship because if the human is standing next to an object, of course I'm more into a human. But it was a challenge for me how to separate it. So, I asked people either to go out from the show for 30 minutes or hide in the room so I can focus, or they should convince me that they are sofas. And most of the people are doing that. And why is it funny and also bizarre? But it's very good practice because they try to be an object. This is the practice I practice myself as well. And then, surprisingly, they really understand what does it mean to be a human. They start questioning what's the real vitality that's hidden in me because you cannot stop thinking. You cannot stop breathing. You want to pee and et cetera, et cetera. So, it's like very expanding your understanding who you are. And then, yeah, this is a show I made for cellos. This project is also great. The only sad part was that the producer that helped me to make this work bought all the cellos to be my audience. And it was a big conflict for me because I wish that none of my audience would be bought. If I travel with sofas, then I really want to do it for local sofas of that place. And it's the same with polystyrene. I don't buy polystyrene. I want polystyrene to be from there. And they are just about to be recycled and just before I make the film for them. And of course, I don't think that polystyrene and sofas will be very happy receiving my work. I know they don't have feelings and et cetera. But I do believe that they have some good vibe, some good energy, and they feel a level of different respect. Yes. And then maybe ducks. So one friend said, Maria, you still have time to do something new. Are you always going to talk to objects? And then said, do a show for humans, please. But I said, well, but non-human topic is very nice. I think it's advancing more and more. And I wanted to keep it. So I said, I don't want to perform for humans. I'm not ready. So what can be performers for humans but non-humans? So I thought about ducks. It was also the corona times. I was walking around the park. And it happened that I thought just looking at them, it makes me so much joy. And in circus, we are like losing this relationship to animals. It's becoming illegal. And it makes me a bit sad, actually. Because it shows with nice human and animal relationship. And then if we completely banned it out, it's a bit like it's good maybe for animals, but it's sad for me. So if I don't manipulate ducks, I don't try to change their environment. I just still, I sit still like a sofa and they look at them. I observe. I listen. I try to learn from them. It's beautiful. So this is how the show works. Like we do a little education lecture for people. And then we are teaching them how to look at life and things and objects, notice. And then we go to the park and people are sitting and watching ducks. It takes two hours. So we are very welcome. Like with lecture, not just watching ducks. What about your practice? Just a little bit about your strategies. Because in all of this work, there are very clear strategies. Oh, good. You reminded me. So my strategies are that it's very paradoxical. So I really like to stay passive and do nothing. But on the other side, I really feel pleasure to look for this vitality and let's bring more life. So I do this or that. I don't like in the middle. Another strategy is that I really, as I mentioned, I try to be an object from time to time. Like, for example, I tried being a sofa, then being a human, then being half-half, and then reflecting. It's very recommended because you understand so much about how much imagination trying to understand what does it mean to be a thing, it brings. I think the level of creativity is hidden in there. And another very important thing is like trying to get out from anthropocentric approach. This is actually what we can expand on human and object relationship. I just find super fascinating about while trying to be something else than yourself. It's like the question of what is the difference between me and a sofa? As silly as it sounds, as strong as it is. It's really nice. And then there is this level of noticing and looking and really about rethinking our perception of objects that is really where our practices as different as they are, we really meet. And I think that the bigger takeaway that we would like to give out of this little talk is really about trying to stress the focus on our perception of the object environment in which we are immersed. And that we are trying to rethink somehow in different ways. You want to tell about your... Yes. There was a last slide about Maria and Polisarum. This is me trying to be Polisarum taking care of vacuum cleaner. In a film of Materia 2.0. In the best cinemas. Okay, my practice. I work with objects. At some point during my transition from juggling towards dance and choreography I started working not anymore with codified circus props and I started being very interested in common objects. So my practice would be to go to a studio completely empty-handed, see what we find them what I would have found there and there are always objects, objects that you think around yourself. And yes, and then I would start playing with these objects. And what I would train is basically not trying to find tricks not trying to develop my own skill and trying to be amazing in displaying this and that but trying to train my creativity because we are born with amazing skill of looking at the world with very curious eyes. We were talking about Ula, the baby, the other day having a 20 minutes investigation of a chair it was fantastic. It was the peak of our both practices. This is the core. Professor for me now how to observe objects. But really, and the more we grow into adulthood the more we become functional human being the more we know how to use things but also we lose the capacity to investigate them. And so defamiliarization as a technique to apply to objects in order to develop a language with each object and then try to build a dialogue this is really where my practice grows. Can I quickly add just not to lose I noticed the same issue that when we are in connection what's the problematic between human and object? When I started to work with sofas these people would ask me but do they like your show? Do they pay for tickets? How they react when you do this? So what it means it means that we immediately put our human perception that the object is kind of me type of thing and then we don't notice what real qualities the object has what does it mean to be a sofa for a sofa as a sofa not a sofa human and I think it's a big big difference to be aware of. Yeah and the real problem with our relationship with objects and the unsustainable part of our relationship with objects is how we perceive and interact with them that it's very often used and disposed kind of relationship. This is why I made a show with polystyrene like trying to look at differently to something that is usually you take it out of the box you take the goods out of the polystyrene and you trash the polystyrene away you go to a lavalette that you get your little picnic box and then there are these boxes of polystyrene flying around but then we're very well taken care of for but yes this is the concept so how can we look how can we put a spotlight on this and look at this thing that we usually don't look at as important and we see it very disposable in a different way. Can we mention what we discovered yesterday about your practice to to look for different affordances for the objects? Yeah, I was getting to that so what I do is trying to discover objects I started working specifically with discarded objects and whenever I go to teach a workshop I ask the presenter that is let's say facilitating the workshop to collect trash basically and this happens with scrapyard, this happens through secondhand shops, there's always something that they cannot sell anymore for long months and they collect and sometimes this grows into shows so here is an example I was at SAC, Seoul Street Art Creation Center I made a project together with a company from Seoul called the Churrosco and we gathered a lot of originally trash but then performative objects from the streets of Seoul and we made a show together this happened in 2021 with the support of Art Council Korea it was really beautiful and yes this was an example of this practice of mine that is looking for affordances for objects perceived objects with two main categories in mind, one being their design function and the second one being their economical value and often we flatten objects to these two parameters polystyrene as a very quickly exhausted function as we mentioned before once it's out of the package it's done, single use material and the second one is very low economical value it doesn't cost much I can throw it away, I can buy something new and this perception really affects the way we interact with things I have my phone here and a glass of water one is not worth as much as the other, I don't relate I don't invest it's completely different relationship and this goes on your daily life but I found it beautiful how we discussed yesterday that rethinking what else this object could afford prolongs the life time of that thing if you stop using the cup as a cup maybe it can be a pot for your plant and maybe later on something else so this is very beautiful sustainability possibility these are a couple of picture from the workshop there are different exercise and different strategies how to engage in a dialogue with objects and how to reinvent objects but as you were saying finding affordances trying to look at things that are familiar in unfamiliar ways it's really my strategy is to try to change our perception whereas you have different ways to somewhat get close to the same goal I go even more radical for example I did the workshop for sofas only people had to come but it was badly organized so I asked sofas to be in the room and for five days I would start with warming up so I warm up my own body and sofa can't warm up itself so I would do a massage for sofa and then we do contact improvisation together and then I was very excited I started to tell to people I'm doing this then some dancers said oh can I come to the workshop I see but you are not a sofa but if you want to do something for sofa please do and then in five days we started rolling around putting sofas on the head and being in very intimate relationship understanding your own body and the sofa this sounds very funny but it's a very anthropocentric practice and the anthropocentrism the core of it is the idea of subjective the idea that we can be affected by object as much as we affect object that the hierarchy somehow flattens and can be reverse even so if we stop thinking of ourselves as being able to use and dispose of everything and we start thinking of our role in the midst of it and how we relate with the different things that we are constantly surrounded by this is magic can happen things suddenly are beautiful are super interesting and you can have a 20 minutes amusement moment with a chair yes but it's hard I would definitely invite you to try this out but it is not easy I would say more than 20 minutes it might get boring I try to talk to sofas and perform for them and then oh I want something else so it's also good not to over judge ourselves but we are still humans and it's impossible to climb out from your own only human perception so what I do in this pessimistic moments when I'm like oh I cannot understand objects even if I try or animals then I'm just saying it's okay Maria just have fun just do whatever you want to do objects will not judge you they will still be in your show because you will bring them in they cannot run away so it just really liberates you so during corona times when everybody was stuck in their houses I did a workshop online for all the artists who cannot go to perform for humans and they said come on go to your room and perform for your objects in the house for your kitchen for your whatever and yeah people got inspired and had fun with it fantastic so we are not done yet we have a very TED Talk professional exercise that we would like to share with you so next slide please investigation time what we would like you to do we would like you to find an object preferably something that belongs to you you are full of objects I am using objects now to communicate with you I am working on myself just find something that belongs to you and we are going to and then we would invite you for one minute one or two can we do two? one and a half one and a half minutes we invite you just to look at the thing keep silent keep exploring and we with Andrea we give one object to each other as well yes but for you it is best you find something that belongs to you and you will find out how alien this thing is we just ask you for this minute and a half to keep your curiosity high not to finish it not to exhaust it like don't close the painting imagine you are a newborn and you are discovering this thing for the first time go baby style I am using a sofa so I wanted to go with the sofa but I don't have big one so I have a very small from my pocket that's perfect thank you do you have an object? yes fantastic then for one minute and a half in silent don't get too excited don't share it yet with your neighbors we do this you ready? we start here and now all around staring at one object in silence on the screen it is called the investigation time and at the invitation of Maria and Andrea we have one minute to stare at an object and I am staring myself at the microphone of course it's a very silence moment we can see people staring at their phone bottle of water let me see more paper I can see a ring small box so much and we are done thank you very much we are done with the access and with the lecture because we have homeworks for you we decided we don't share any of this experience you can share afterwards with your neighbors let's go to the homework first homework you can do the same thing with something that is in the way to your house it could be a tree, it could be a lamp it could be a graffiti on the wall if you stop for the first time 30 seconds to explore this in the same way you will never be able to see that thing the same way again you will always notice it when you go back home it happens so please do this homework only 30 seconds and if you want to go more radical try to be an object for two hours if you need help call me I will explain how to do it so thank you for listening to us thank you very much thank you so much Maria and Andrea so we have a 10 minute break now you can get up and get out if you want now we come back in 10 minutes, right? it is 25 but 11 local time here in Paris Pelouse, Roi, Villages de Cirque you are listening to fresh wave radio station streaming live the event and the artistic talk now we could think of an object to be in relationship with an object being a sofa and as you know in this event there are performances in the afternoon and and this is why I invited Fabrice Guillault from the company Retour Amont who does with the city like they asked to do with the object and I wanted to invite you Fabrice because your company does outdoor performance vertical performance and since one year is used to perform in the new circus place, new outdoor place here in Paris which is called Street Wat so I wanted to know first how does it look this specific place in Paris, the Rue Wat where this afternoon you will be perform again this Rue Wat it's quite strange and funny because it's nearly invisible when you arrive on the square you you see nothing a flat square you have some railings and when you watch under there is a hole like a canyon, a urban canyon and in this urban canyon you have the Rue Wat the name of the street then you need to take the stairs to go to that place and you can come into this creation on the pedagogic space it's a really interesting laboratory then it's when you are in the streets you have some walls 12 meters high and up there you have the square and up the square you have some buildings then it's multi-level space and there is some studios of creations and we made first time of creation that space in the wall then we were dancing on the walls and we the journey the movement of the dancer was doing some draws on the fresh paint then it will stay there for a moment and we began also to explore with students of the university because there is a university in the same street with a dance studio we have to say that this street is located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris which is very close to the new library the library of François Mitterrand it's a new old area that was re-urbanized with new buildings there is this university of Tolbiac very next to it the river is not so far away and it's in the south of Paris so just look to see the 13th arrondissement very nice and very lively area absolutely with a lot also of Chinese community of restaurants we had many experiences just now in that space and I like to imagine that the place where our work is like an apparatus it's exactly if I begin an exploration of the space and the creation space has some pillars some truss at the vertical there is some truss on the roof it's possible to hang on the wall we can dance in the void also then we are not using only the surface on the ground but you are using that space in the three dimensions completely because it's possible to hang everywhere it's possible to climb in the truss to go into the truss also in the really little space and we began this exploration with students of different levels some it's a spectacular place but it's not so easy to take the space in this place how do you look at it naturally how do you look to a place like that when you first arrive and say okay I will perform where is the first look for my practice it's really easy to imagine something in that space and it was really interesting the process we had in that studio we began the creation the research of the creation on the wall and a few months after we came again but we opened the door and we went on the wall of the real street because that wall is higher and it was really interesting to have a first exploration with a low level, 8 meters high and now we are outside with a 13 meters high and we continue the creation for weeks on that wall it's interesting for a space with open to street art it's a kind of laboratory we can begin to explore to imagine some process some movements and after that it's open to the streets it's open to the square up there it's open to the district but what is difficult when you do open air in the city we can imagine there is electricity there is cars buses people how do you work with the life inside the city while you work in this place I made this choice to do the creations nearly all the time of creation we do that sometimes outside in the city in order of with no specific organization and it's a surprise for people because when you have a show you have a meeting you know at what time it will begin but us we are we have some weeks and nobody knows what we are doing and some people are stopping asking and it's always interesting to create a kind of surprise with piece of art at the beginning we start we imagine the vocabulary step by step we arrive to the creation and we made the première the 2 of september on the wall just in front rewats tell us a bit more about what is happening this afternoon in the rewats we see it's a street but it's not only a street it's also a wall it's underneath it's a complex like a geometrical space it's a work about horizontality of pedestrian space and verticality and there is there is a limit there is a border between the horizontal and the vertical element of the street and I imagine that this limit doesn't exist anymore for my dancer because she can walk on the ground walk on the wall with absolutely no difference no border then it's a way to say we can forget some limits we have like a pedestrian like a citizen in the city and it's interesting to imagine that the borders the limits, interdictions can disappear sometimes yeah it's a metaphor of to go behind the boundaries to go behind you have already 20 years Gio tell us some amazing or strange or different places you went to perform all around the world last week we had an extreme experience in the Mont Saint-Michel it was it was incredible because we proposed to the audience to stay in front of the little mountains of the Mont Saint-Michel and the objective was to have this proposition to inhabit from the highest point of the Mont Saint-Michel and to be up to the audience sometimes really near the audience and how it was possible to inhabit completely this mountain with only 8 dancers but it was possible because we work at night and we have also some repertoires some process with video with big shadows and with our ropes we had the possibility to put some new journey, new lines to new trails in the void to go from the highest point to the place where is the audience and it was one of the biggest more complex space we never practiced before and abroad in the foreign country is there a place where you would like to go and dance because you try to dance into the sky in a way towards the sky also maybe I don't know if it's the ultimate destiny it is our future anyway I like to imagine some apparatus are fixed on the wall some of them can be hanged in the void because it's the vertical dance we imagine more walking on the wall dancing on the wall but we are the company exists since 35 years I said 20 because you look young and for a long time we dance on the walls and I had a kind of frustration to not inhabit the void then we begin to put some ropes between two buildings and after I began to imagine some apparatus to inhabit the void and the first of them was pyramid of rope with only four ropes but it was occupied by three artists inside that big pyramid it goes at 20 meters high and we hang that pyramid in many countries all the continents and it was a beautiful exploration of the void we made that in industrial spaces in fields near the sea in the mountains in the center of many cities and each time this apparatus is completely transparent then it's like if you put a slide then you see the action but you can see completely the city through it yes is it difficult to do this work in the city you have the authorization is it easy to invest the city when you do this kind of artistic movement in the buildings in fact for us it's really easy I say it's easy but it's a lot of work but we have the knowledges to organize that for example for the Monsa Michel we play also in the bibliothèque François Mitterrand then we made a show with 14 people it was a European meeting of vertical dance we began in Rewat with students of the university and after we went step by step to the bibliothèque François Mitterrand then we know how to speak to the owners to the people who are working on safeties and for us we are like like some workers like we have a process it's like if we are doing some paint on the wall then the people in front of us they understand our vocabulary and we imagine together some process about safety, about public protection and everything about the protection of the site also because when we are working on old buildings but the new ones they are not made for vertical dance then we need each time to imagine our anchors because it's often only glasses without way to put your feet or your hand the city has changed and the city is not made to be climbed down now this is what you observe it's completely incredible because with this practice we cross all the limits all the borders there is absolutely no limit I have a friend architect who is saying that the only limit is the distance where we can see because we can do what we want and it's funny because the owners and the city mayor and everybody ask us to do some impossible things and what is your favorite city to do your work your artistic work I'm really happy some time to work on really invisible sites for example we made an enormous project with 20 artists on the pillars of motorway in Saint-Denis which is in the northern part of Paris yeah it was a yes exactly but it was for meeting about architecture and the people say after when they saw the show on that pillar of the motorway we were under the motorway and they say oh it's a cathedral for dancing it's so so it seems to be made for then we will do some shows here later and I like also to work of course on beautiful spaces like Mont Saint-Michel but both are really interesting it's this notion of the relation we have to the city for me it's quite complex and we spend some time with that pillars with the different objects we are touching them we are spending time in the void between and we begin to inhabit and to have a strong relation to that space and we finish to love it really and we have some way we are kind with that matter some something really sweet with a strong easy object of the architecture is it dangerous did you have any accident never yeah but it's for that reason I have some white hairs I'm always afraid about the safety and it's it's not easy but for more than 30 years you're still scared yeah absolutely but at the base I am a climber then the risk in mountaineering or climbing even if you have the good material you have to take care on and what is the most risky to climb on the mountains or to climb on the buildings because you have many many risks you can't imagine I'm more a bouldering climber on a cliff climber then in mountaineering it's too dangerous and in the city we are obliged to take care about many many things you can control it whether it's bad weather you don't climb or do you do do you do your artistic show yeah absolutely I use the material my technical director is a architect and he's also a climber and then we have multi skills multi knowledges about construction about the rules about the material and we think always to the safety but my technical director Olivier Penel is not afraid he slips well he's a lucky man yeah yeah yeah absolutely what would be your dream what would be your dream like next big project or maybe small project yeah I'm really happy to to do this creation we just made this solo for me it's nearly a synthetic about the name of the company it's Rotoramon and with this solo it's like if we can give the image of we can go into the vertical direction we can be taken something like this like if gravity sometimes doesn't exist sometimes you come back to the ground because the ground is really present and I think that verticality it's from the rule to the to the stars it's what said the poet Roberto Rojas and we try to inhabit this we need the gravity to go down and sometimes the gravity perhaps doesn't exist we are taken by spiral I don't know what of energy we can go up and perhaps we saw that in the Monsa Michel we made a reality about the dream of the eyes of the tourists who are watching us and we try to the eyes of the tourists who are watching to the at the top of the Monsa Michel and with our ropes it's possible to do this journey of verticality that everybody has this dream to go further to jump on the wall to inhabit the void thank you yeah thank you let's go back to the ground now absolutely the last part of the morning thank you very much Fabrice Guillaume Compagnie Retour Amont talking about Rewa, Monsa Michel Sunny and all these places back to the morning session we are streaming now this morning fresh it's the last round table that will happen now it's one hour, one hour and an half round table with 5 panellists everybody