Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges places the methodological legacies of five elder radical performance artists into a series of practical dialogues. Five international performance art residencies and additional seminars on creative methods, cultural tensions and material practices inform this encounter of indigenous and other performance artists, resulting in a living exhibition and published handbook.
The participants are figures from rich traditions of radical aesthetics: each artists' contribution through the residencies are shared and put into motion in a practical way in the next workshop, so the tensions and dialogues between their unique performance legacies remain vital. The project aims to translate into practice elders’ artistic legacy. This can be only achieved by an immersive artistic encounter that involves, the performer ́s body, movement, sound, and visual expression because they represent the material from which the creative products will emerge
The project facilitates from an indigenous perspective in intergenerational spaces by project leader Mexican/indigenous artist Professor Saul Garcia-Lopez. Embodied practices are shared through contested modes of inhabiting spaces and institutions.
"Performance knowledge" includes composition and ritual forms, speech acts, expressive actions, situational aesthetics, body and land art and new material relations. Urgency lies in a critical reflection that combines ritual and performance art modes across generations, lead by indigenous perspectives.
Regular "Mini-seminars" local involving community and indigenous elders, plus a reflection workshop with MA students around the final exhibition give critical context to the work beyond the workshop residencies themselves. Research results/methods will also be expressed partly through as series of photo performances: these will incorporate living everyday artifacts, costumes, embodied practices as images explored during the residencies. Creating a transgenerational imaginary, these co-created, living performance "portraits" reflect the creative legacy of the practices and act as a portal to the other shared workshop results. Podcasts, short films, texts, artifacts and pedagogical / compositional methods are shared through exhibition and publication. This will offer new and archival performance art material from the artists, students and researcher himself. The editing of a published handbook of performance recipes/exercises as both document and tool will reflect the intergenerational tasks, forms, questions as knowledge emerging from the workshops.
A final touring exhibition begins at Gallery F15 of artistic material and documentation: images, radical critiques, actions and artifacts of the workshops as well as a living experience for the audiences that encounter the artists ́ legacy and the artistic practice for the first time