I.UNSETTLED LANDSCAPE. The project is anchored in a postcolonial context. As the landscape displays the historical, culturally, religiously duality and dynamic tensions, as well as mutations, between Inuit Philosophy and Western thinking (Danish/European) as European modernity, arrived in Kalaallit Nunat in early 1800- Century. In the recent past, the classical ideals of the Nordic Welfare State Model lead the Danish modernization process of Kalaallit Nunat. Accordingly, the project functions as a site for renegotiating of modernization, proposing other ways of organizing society and new modes of living in a complex interconnected landscape.
The research and production that is launched within the project explore new sensitivities and other interconnections between humans, technology, material and “nature”, a renegotiation of the contracts between them, as well as the historical and political realities. It aims to contribute to new aesthetic paradigms as consequence of the swift changes in our ecological systems and political discourse, as we have entered a new geological era of human-made nature and a postcolonial understanding of contemporary society. Where exactly new sensitivities and other interconnections with our surrounding is out of necessity.
II. AMBIVALENCE, LOSS, RECOVERY, TRANSFORMATION. Historically, culturally and religiously Kalaallit Nunat finds itself to be placed somewhere between traditions of the Inuit world and the Western (Danish/European). This duality that may lead to ambivalence has to be recognized as a difficult and challenging condition of cultural practice in general and art production in particular. Therefore serious and persistent attempts to recover and apply the mind of the Inuit world as much as Westering thinking in the field of culture and art.
At Nunatta isiginnaartitsinermik ilinniarfia (The National School of Acting in Greenland) and among theatre- makers the question of loss is central, where the practice of recover Inuit Knowledge and values, that are embodied in cultural forms such as mask- & drum- dance is essential. Furthermore, by insisting on using Kalaallisut the Inuit thinking tradition is foregrounded in production processes and on stage. The practice of recovery is necessary, as much as the duality also opens up from western theatrical traditions, where one navigate between recognizing as much as resist these western forms and their epistemologies. How does one cultivate contemporary performance practices based on those principals?
Through this type of practice, the political- and cultural- history of the land becomes the base of the work. Where one becomes aware of the past, values, knowledge, the land- scape and its impact on one’s practice. It can be perceived as a transformative method of exploring contemporary land- scapes and performance forms. In this way, one is creating, developing, and producing performances on one’s own terms, in a process of reterritorialization of one´s practices within local and global contexts.
III. STAGE, STAGING, STAGED BODIES. What is the status of bodies (cultural, social, political) between the intimacy of the stage and public space? Is there no other ontology than the stage, staging and the staged? The constructed idea of the scene is, not embedded, but weaved and produced into to being, as a semantic matrix based on power relations, within in an aesthetical regime of transformative potential. How does one exist, perform, and conceptualize ones being or non- being in regard to the hyper-visibility of the stage? How do artists and curators challenge the problematic relationship between the audience and interrogate the legacy of the indigenous as the spectacle of the authentic and native?
RICKARD BORGSTRÖM 