Mapping new worlds
Exploring artistic creation
Customized guidance by Sarah Di Bella - performance historian and dramaturg .
What I propose as the very first thing to do for an artist with an idea of project is a cartographic game in three stages. The dramaturgical invitation consists in opening ourselves up to the vast field of material memory, weaving together the spirit of "transdisciplinary poaching" with the "philosophy of tracking". This makes it possible to follow the trail of forms that colonize one's imagination, to question the maps of mass distribution and to point out the tensions that they make invisible or neutralize. The goal is to propose an alternative to those maps and to give this alternative an artistic and specific shape. That needs to find and go through other images that can efficiently antagonize the figures of domination or tetanization. Reversing their power balance by the instruments of the semantic power allows to create a new destiny for those kinds of forms that have been marginalized or that, on the contrary, impress our cultural spaces.
photo © César Vayssié
The German term dramaturg allows to attach our method more immediately to a branch of the history of dramaturgy that has been defined as the "dramaturgy of experience", where the dramaturg participates in the "system of presences" by developing micro-dramaturgies of situations and of action, thereby defining and fertilizing the terrain of the encounter between theater and society. See Claudio Meldolesi and Renata Molinari, Il lavoro del dramaturg, Ubulibri, 2007. The modules of accompaniment designed by Sarah Di Bella combine a decidedly sensitive and intuitive approach with intellectual rigor, fully at the service of each artistic singularity.
"The map is not an object but a function", Ch. Jacob, L'empire des cartes, 1992, p. 29. The map, a graphic work of spatialization, lies at the crossroads of the iconic turn and the spatial turn, and by definition invites imaginary investment. By “images of thought" we mean "figures created to tame what language is powerless to grasp: the emergence of thought in its secret effervescence" (M.-H. Caraës and N. Marchand-Zanartu, Images de pensée, 2019); while a “map of vision" takes us a step further in thinking about the relationships involved, then signals the birth of what we call the project. Each artist will be accompanied in the elaboration of this visual device to find their own system of signs, the singular, malleable matrix of future research.
For the project to result in a creation, the initial map will have to be measured against a territory, and therefore against a collective imaginary already at work, in order to point out dead ends, point out the invisible, unfold new paths, extend roadblocks, propose updates or salutary deviations. Working at the heart of the collective imaginary implies setting in motion sensitive and critical research to identify and select the markers of dominant narratives through research into figures - a composition of signs that make gestures or gestures that make signs - from which it is possible to constitute an iconography, recognizable in relation to an anthropologically determined memory. Through artistic and critical research into the figures of the imaginary, the tensions between map and territory will be formulated and demonstrated at the height of their complexity and creative potential.
The work produced in the first two stages enables us to build up a solid dossier and to exercise the project leader's critical mind. The writing process can then be nourished as much as necessary by feedback from research, and the transmission of issues to collaborators and potential partners will be all the more organically evolving and clear. As long as the performing arts are able to help define the world, each creation will have to deal with the tensions between the map and the territory of the dominant imaginary, between the vision it proposes and the most outside view, to inform the latter of its metamorphic potential.