A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe

24 transcribed public conversations led by Xavier Le Roy with artists and cultural workers, creating a space where Le Roy's work meets the experiences of his guests.

Lives Shaping Works Making Life is a collection of 24 transcribed public conversations titled Practices: Strategies and Tactics, led by Xavier Le Roy and hosted by the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen between November 2022 and November 2024. These dialogues bring together artists and cultural workers creating a space where Xavier Le Roy's work engages in conversation with the experiences of each guest. Each encounter follows the same set of 14 questions—printed on the book's cover—which serve as a flexible framework guiding the conversations. Through the careful editing of Giulia Casartelli, Daniel Cordova, and Livia Andrea Piazza, these conversations have been transformed into vivid, polyphonic texts that invite further reflection and offer a point of departure for expanding the dialogue beyond the original live encounters.

Conversations with Antonia Baehr, Matthias Mohr, João Fiadeiro, Herbordt / Mohren, Carolina Mendonça, Rolf Michenfelder, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić, Joana Tischkau, Giulia Casartelli, Susanne Zaun & Judith Altmeyer, Florence Lam, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Jorge Alencar & Neto Machado, Rabih Mroué, Ruth Geiersberger, Swoosh Lieu, Arkadi Zaides, Valeria Graziano, Mette Edvardsen, Mala Kline, Sarah Parolin, Andros Zins-Browne, Rose Beermann.

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

The bilingual book ‘Aesopica’ documents and extends Rūta Junevičiūtė’s research on the Aesopian language and the influence of political censorship to contemporary collective body, first presented in 2020 as the eponymous solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and as a permanent outdoor installation at the Rupert Art Center, Vilnius. 

Taking as a starting point the historical phenomenon of Aesopian language, which was widespread in Lithuanian culture during the Soviet era, and in parts of the Russian Empire as early as the 19th century, Junevičiūtė aims to investigate the interrelationship between generations, the gray zones of collective identity creation and the processes of (un)censoring the archives of our bodies.

Aesopian language – a term coined after Ancient Greek fabulist Aesop (gr. Aísōpos), is a type of cryptic communication system, where a text has several layers of meaning often contradictory to each other and which seek to convey official and subversive hidden meanings simultaneously. It is usually employed under conditions of omnipresent state censorship to communicate officially forbidden or taboo subjects and opinions. As a system it contains three members – an author, a censor, and a reader. It uses various modes of circumlocution and euphemisation, innuendo and poetic paraphrasing, which can also be seen as an aesthetic style. It has been advocated for artistic benefits as poetics of omissions, concealment, and travesty. On the other hand, it has been criticized as a sign of conformity and humiliation. In Lithuania, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been popularly regarded as a position of dissent, but such an interpretation received criticism from contemporary scholars. “Such a mode of expression is probably as old as censorship itself” – a historian told us.

Text contributors: Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Rūta Junevičiūtė, Goshka Macuga, Anastasia Sosunova, Grėtė Šmitaitė, Tomas Venclova, Ana Vujanović

Language editors: Dangė Vitkienė, Aira Niauronytė, Gemma Lloyd

Translators: Alexandra Bondarev, Erika Lastovskytė, Justinas Šuliokas, Mantė Zagurskytė-Tamulevičienė, Aistis Žekevičius.

Illustrations: Rūta Junevičiūtė.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol 2 ‘discores’ is written by Kexin Hao, Luca Soudant, HaYoung, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen. Five strangers are stuck in changing boots next to each other and decide to embark on an intimate conversation starting from the question: “What is troubling your sexuality at the moment?”.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

KNEE BALANCE (2021) is a performance that uses choreography, writing, photography, and design to traverse particular anatomical, personal, and sociopolitical arcs. Time oscillates and fractures movement. Space unfolds. Situated before a hearth in the throes of balance, the performer becomes a crucible for memory, durability, and the reciprocal relationship between the present and the unforeseen.

Comes nested inside ad hoc polyvinyl sleeve with text by Matty Davis printed on front

This work marks the first in a series of performances by Matty Davis arranged for print by Matt Wolff. Distinct in content and form, each work weaves psychosomatic realities with the spatial and temporal possibilities of print.

Vital contributions have been made to this series of performances by artists including Will Arbery, Whitney Browne, Mark Davis, Eryka Dellenbach, Nile Harris, Jonah Rosenberg, Holly Sass, Matt Shalzi, and Bobbi Jene Smith.

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

A transdisciplinary investigation and a choreographic performance, between Umeå and Oslo, about ecological grief, cultural panic, and a feeling of collapse.

How to Die – Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå. They host a working process and encounter external informants. The goal is to displace oneself into the unexpected. This publication, two years in the making, engages with the challenges of translating a choreographic process into the space of a book. It both documents the project's development as well as offering the reader-doer different modes of thinking-doing, from somatic practices to proposals for a curriculum. Experiments in writing, mapping, and moving are played with, all engaging with the question, "what is the future of displaced thinking?"

Published following the series of eponymous events held in Umeå, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik in 2019-2020.

Contributions by Harald Becharie, Mia Habib, Jassem Hindi, Asher Lev, Marie Kraft Selze, Namik Mačkić, Ingeborg Olerud, Anna Pehrsson, Ashkan Sepahvand, Nina Wollny.

Jupiter is the monograph of the artist Andreas Sell by the curator Joel Mu and the outcome of their collaboration. It includes a selection of Andreas’ work of the last fifteen years, an essay in five parts by Joel and a poem by Alice Heyward. Andreas’ work often coincides with his life story, composing both a material and immaterial narration. Joel shares biographical and autobiographical stories in his writing about Andreas’ work. The narratives intertwine.

Personal experiences, memories and relationships take shape with matter, images and words trying to make sense of the world—its social conditions and politics, other people and life itself.

Jupiter is about Andreas Sell’s ‘Life Performance’ as the title of the book suggests; it explores life performance from the constant position of a foreigner, from a viewpoint on the side. Andreas and Joel reflect on identities and challenge categorization; they seek for a more inclusive sense of belonging and defend the multiplicity of oneness. Jupiter also defies categorization; it is a monograph, but also a biography, an autobiography, a catalogue, an artist book, a diary, a collective work on one person’s work. — Text by Galini Noti