FOREWORD

The inaugural Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations: a porous space bridging solidarities and knowledges in the precarious present.

E-booklet

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is the inaugural live gathering of 15 Per°Form Fellows from the Global South – Africa, Arab World, Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, South America – and its diaspora. These Fellows, intersectional practitioners across diverse disciplines of curation, research, education, visual culture, performance, will present their strategies for activating contexts and communities.

Per°Form is conceptualised and led by T:>Works Artistic Director, Dr. Ong Keng Sen. This fellowship platform began in March 2021 through the format of digital keynotes by Singapore fellows. 

With Per°Form, T:>Works aims to cut across silos, disciplines, and fields to support contextualised research, situated practices, and translocal knowledge production as shared resources for the future. In particular, Per°Form focuses on the arts practitioner as a thought leader engaged in care and repair, actively bridging histories, the precarious present, and world-creating. 

For Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations, Dr. Ong draws inspiration from his seminal work investigating nomadic alternative universities and world-creating in the arts: The Flying Circus Project (1996–2013), as well as The Curators Academy (2018-2022) including the Berlin collaboration with Maxim Gorki Theater.

Why an Open Academy? The Academy can be traced to the Greek classical centre of learning dedicated to wisdom and skill. Today, the Academy has developed into institutes of secondary and tertiary higher learning, generally with research or honorary membership, concerned about “the accumulation, development, and transmission of knowledge across generations, as well as its practitioners and transmitters.”¹ To this end, the Open Academy embraces alternatives to such a route, implying an openness which opposes hierarchical learning, refuses elite membership, and ultimately unpacks the institution into a porous space.  

The Per°Form Open Academy aspires towards planetary consciousness. Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian public intellectual, wrote: “For me, the planetary immediately evokes a connection between life and its futures on the one hand, and the Earth on the other hand. What comes to my mind is the biophysical organic material and mineral order — a geological magma-filled rock topped with the entangled orders of physical, organic phenomena such as plants, animals, minerals and so forth, as well as the artifacts and things and tools we have invented … I find it almost impossible to think of the planetary without thinking about life and about the Earth. I probably owe that to my interest in the animist metaphysics of precolonial Africa. That’s the archive I draw on to propose this kind of understanding of the planetary as so closely linked to life, which itself is an indivisible process.”²

Dr. Ong elaborates, “the idea of openness and porosity is even more important when we evaluate and redefine how we sustain liveability on Earth. We have arrived at a complex fusion of life and the Earth, rather than a separation of human and non-human. In particular, the planetary refers explicitly to the artefacts, things, and tools which the human has invented such as notations, writings, books, objects, stills, moving image recordings and the digital. There is also a connection made between animism and metaphysics, bringing in a spiritual, irrational realm which the human and non-human do not necessarily rationally include. Our emphasis in Per°Form is living, multiplicity, and transformation on this geological magma-filled rock.”

Central to the Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is a marathon format on 15 April stretching from 11am to 1am the next day, where the audience is encouraged to visit for an hour or two, or stay for as long as they desire. This marathon format has its precedents in the legacy of T:>Works’ The Flying Circus Project (1996 – 2013).

The 14 Global South Fellows are Aouefa Amoussouvi; Chidumaga Uzoma Orji; Giuliana Kiersz; Helia Hamedani; Keren Lasme; Ladji Kone; Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas; Mona Benyamin; Nirlyn Seijas; Rah Naqvi; Renan Laru-an; Rola Khayyat; Soukaina Aboulaoula; Tara Fatehi.

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is presented by T:>Works, an independent and international arts company based in Singapore at its space 72-13. T:>Works’ mission and vision include the pioneering of thought leadership in the arts focused on transdisciplinary, transcultural, and inclusive processes. To this end, there is a strong educational perspective with research and discourse contextualising histories, contemporary experiences, and situated art practices of the global south.

1 Wikipedia.

2Achille Mbembe, “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness,” Interview with Nils Gilman and Jonathan S. Blake, Noema Magazine, Berggruen Institute, accessed 10 February 2023,https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/.