This homemade podcast is designed for Schlosspost at Akademie Schloss Solitude as a collaboration between choreographer Igor Koruga and art theorist Edith Lázár.
This podcast is not depressive – it is about depression.
This podcast is about depression, anxiety, apathy, hopelessness, helplessness, impasse, indifference, loneliness, melancholy, panic, sadness and other »negative feelings.«
This podcast reads these negative feelings not only medically – as mental health conditions (and pathologies) – but also as significant sociopolitical and cultural markers of present neoliberal society and capitalist realism.
This podcast tries to articulate not what we think about neoliberalism or capitalism but how we feel in it.
This podcast aims to contribute to the process of public recognition and depathologization of negative feelings: by turning them from individual into collective issues; by enabling an opportunity to work with or against those feelings instead of denying them; and by treating such feelings as conditions for joint political action in society in order to imagine the construction of a new world.
This podcast is a tryout for a choreographic proposal. It is a series of digital audio files that, all together and each particularly, are designed with a choreographic structure and dramaturgy – consisting of landscapes of different layers of sound, voice, articulation, and affects.
As an extended choreographic practice within digitalized medium, this podcast departs from the function of creativity subordinated only to an artistic expression of its protagonists’/artists’ inner emotional depths. It rather aims to influence the value, ideological and other dominant systems that are recognized within the social, political, and cultural context in which it is created.
This choreo-podcast is not cynical. Nor sarcastic. It communicates from the positions in between ironic earnestness and depressive realism within a posthuman realm.
Analyzing how can we approach depression or negative feelings as social phenomena, during this session we focus specifically on the basic life and work conditions in overall cultural and art production which trigger states of anxiety, stress, and depression.
- Theoretical background
Depression, a Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich
Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
I Know You’ve Been Hurt: Solace and Semblance of Self-Care by Tamara Antonijevic and Henrike Kohpeiß
Performance of the Self by Ervin Goffman
Artist at Work, Proxiity of Art and Capitalism by Bojana Kunst
Collectivity? You Mean Collaboration by Bojana Kunst
Dancing Precarity by Annelise van Aschee
Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to defy the pressure to perform by Jan Verwoert
Notes on the Anguished Languages of Crisis by John Cunningham
Is it Love? by Brian Kuan Wood
Future 1513. For a not Schedulable Life by Pietro del Soldà
The Great Transformation of 19th-20th century by Karl Polanyi
Fearless of Speech by Michel Foucault
Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday – (eds.)
Take Me I’m Yours: Neoliberalising the Cultural Institution by Anthony Davies - Reading of texts from Portrait of the Artist as a Worker by Dieter Lesage and from artistic work Only Mine Alone (2016) by Ana Dubljević and Igor Koruga
- Music
»Absent-Minded Friend,« Moloko, Things to Make and Do (2000), Echo Records, UK
»Work It,« Marie Davidson, Working Class Woman (2018), Ninja Tune, UK
»Scream,« Kelis, Flesh Tone (2010), Interscope records, USA
Experiencing depression has many sorts of embodiments and affects. This session is dedicated to exchanges about how we feel whenever such a state hits us. Dealing with this state through everyday precarious living and working conditions is challenging. The podcast delves into the intricacies of such challenges.
- Theoretical background
Soul on Strike by Jason Smith
All of us go a little crazy at times: Capital and Fiction in a State of Generalized Psychosis by Arne De Boever
I Can’t Work Like This: A Reader on Recent Boycotts and Contemporary Art by Joanna Warsza (ed.)
How Do We Express Depression to Ourselves? by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform by Jan Verwoert - Reading materials and texts from artistic works of Igor Koruga: Streamlined (2014) and Impasse (2015)
- Music
»Holloway,« Damien Swartz (2009), White Label, Norway
»Listen to my soul« (Bright Soul Version) – Niconé, Enda Gallery, Dark Bright Soul (2018), Bar 25 Music.
»You can have it all« Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (2000), Matador labels, UK
Can depression be a tool for reinventing our sociability in order to open the space of sensibility, solidarity, empathy, eros, freedom? What would be the sensitive entity within human communication and relations for such reinvention to start?
- Theoretical background
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life by George Shulman
The Fashioned Body: Theorizing Fashion and Dress in Modern Society by Joanne Entwistle
Unsorcery, by Alina Popa and Florin Flueras
Soul on Strike by Jason Smith
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, by Michel Foucault
Is it Love? by Brian Kuan Wood
Why Are People Being So Nice? by Martha Rosler - Listening audio materials from interview with Slavoj Žižek »On Synthetic Sex and Being Yourself« (Big Think Edge: http://bit.ly/bigthinkedge) and a lecture by Franco Berardi Bifo »The Future After the End of the Economy« at Stella Art Foundation, May 15, 2012.
- Music
»French Kiss« (original mix) by Little Louis, From the Mind of Lil’ Louis (1989) FFRR Records
»The Man with a Red Face« by Laurent Garnier (2000), F Communications, PIAS Benelux, PIAS Benelux, Europe
»Glue« by Bicep, Ninja Tune (2017)
It seems that practicing self-care and caring for each other requires radically new approaches. Instead of coming up with utopian perspectives on solidarity, final questions remain: is it possible to affirmatively accept the state of hopelessness in which all chances for emancipation have been completely abolished? Is there a third way to face it, between utter despair and total surrender? And what happens when we finally run out of it?
- Theoretical background
Bodies of Allience by Judith Butler
The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
I Know You’ve Been Hurt: Solace and Semblance of Self-Care by Tamara Antonijević and Henrike Kohpeiß
The Age of Hopelessness by Slavoj Žižek
Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco Berardi Bifo
The Transformative Power of Performance by Erika Fischer Lichte
Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert
Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday – eds
How to Heal a Depression by Franco Bifo Berardi
Values beyond Values: Is Anything Beyond the Logic of Capital? by Beverley Skegg,s Take Care. How to Work Better by Anthony Huberman
So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen - Listening audio materials from art work Impasse (2015) by Igor Koruga
- Music
»Sunday Glide« (Original mix) – Kermesese (2017), The Magic Movement
»Destructive Cycle« – Kedr Livanskiy, January Sun (2016), 2MR – Electronic Record Label
»Poison Lips« – Vitalic, Flashmob (2009), PIAS Recordings.