| Recidency center | |
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| Recidency type | |
| Art form | |
| Time of residency | May 2025 |
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| Contact info | oliversaledance(@)gmail.com |
| Definition of artistic practice? | My interests are fragile and indeterminate, hodgepodge and higgledypiggledy. They are low to the ground, looking to the sky. They are strange, skeive, far from centre. They are classifiable, resisting classification. They are decentralised, disorganised, deeply politicised. They are material, matter made wrong, matter made with chaos. They are the shadows, the shadow workers, the shadow selves, the shadows of understanding. They are going home to an unknown place. They are an unknown place in your own home. - From “An Anti-Arbeidsstipend” by Oliver Sale, 2024 |
| Title of the investigation at the residency | Lazy Research: Explorations into living as art |
| Description of investigations and findings | Somatics, poetry, composition, disagreement, cooking, reading, holding, dancing, singing, mourning, playing the jaw harp, taking the trash out, cuddling, listening, writing (a lot) all compose this time together. In general I am a fan of the unnamed and unnameable, the spaces that resist being understood through concrete classification. I prefer things that remain nebulous, uncertain, because that is the practice of living: to “attune [oneself] to the radiance of empty space, of the not-yet-thing” (Brook Ziporyn) My findings then, were subtle and long lasting. The sensation of my fascia and it’s overlap with my mycelic imaginations. The knowledge (as depicted below) of the radical potential for co-ownership, as well as its real difficulties. That allowing the research to happen unattended is a productive and fruitful approach. Time and relationship produce creative forces. Being together in space is enough. The rest happens as a response to such things. |
| What are you most curious about or invested in in your own practice? | I am always curious about Queerness, and understanding that as a sense, a vibe, as an affiliation or comradeship, rather then as an identity marker. In this way, my work with queerness is always about getting people "on side", helping people come around to their own subtle queer experiences, their dreams of other ways of being. I am interested in how we make people weirder, queerer through our art making, and what we must shout loudly, and what we can subtly eek out. |
| What questions did you bring to investigate and what questions are you leaving with? | How can queerness and kin-making overlap and facilitate one another? How can performances recruit comrades to queer and ecological struggles? How can queer and ecological imaginations help audience members in challenging heteronormative conceptions of reality? How can pluralist approaches and communal living deepen and support socio-somatic practices? |
| Transformative, creative moments at the residency | Opening the fridge on the first Wednesday and feeling that I could eat anything in it if I wanted to. That there was abundance and sharing. I had no need to gorge myself, no need to claim something as mine. Everything was simply shared, was the collectives. It was a radical moment of confirmation. It exploded my working mind. |
| Keywords for the work done at the residency | coexistence, Collaboration, Communal cooking, Utopia |
| Research locations | Baltic Sea, BIRCA grounds, Black Space (BIRCA), White Space (BIRCA), Wood at BIRCA |
| Further documentation | BIRCA TEXTS OLIVER |
| Photos documenting the research |
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| Videos of work in progess or reflections | |
| Webside links |
Oliver Sale
