©Thomas Lenden
Micro - Encounters
Between 2016 and 2018, I have set out to explore the potential of developing a long-term practice of encountering people, where I initiate encounters that have undefined and imperceptible functions. This practice, and the multiplication of objects proliferating from it, operate on a micro scale of visibility, temporality and expectations.
It’s an investigation on how to resist the imperative to perform, to accelerate and to become a commodity, by creating frames/circumstances/situations for resonance, emptiness, imperceptibility, awkwardness of not knowing and having to position from within. Micro-encounters as situations in-between commonality and performativity.
This practice has generated two different works that are part of its living archive:
© Thomas Lenden
The shadow
cast upon the ground composes your questions is a sound installation, created
in collaboration with Molly Macleod, where the audience needs to
touch another body in order to listen. As part of a living archive, it materializes how the memory of all the
encounters has been composting in my body, while leaving space for the audience to relate
with broader themes deriving from this practice: the fear of being forgotten,
ephemeral condition of existence, immateriality of memory, the encounter with
the unknown, love as experiencing the world from difference and not identity,
etc.
© Thomas Lenden
Gestures
of Encountering investigates the format of the workshop as a
performative event of togetherness, expanding its limits beyond the educational
and therapeutic field. This workshop proposes a place for embodied processes of
negotiation as generators of reflection on autonomy and intimacy. My intention
is to create conditions where these can be practiced/questioned in an embodied
microscopic prefigurative way.
Presented at DAS-Graduate School, in June of 2018.
Project by: Catarina Vieira
Artistic Collaboration (Sound Installation): Molly Macleod
Dramaturgical Support: Jonas Schnor
Support: DAS-Graduate School (Amsterdão), NAVE (Santiago de Chile), K.A.K. -Koekelbergse Alliantie van Knutselaars (Bruxelas)