point of departure for the Suns and Stars programme

After the Second World War, the importance of community was considered at many levels. Artists and others ruminated on the potential of (art) communities and experimented with different forms of, what we now call transdisciplinary collaborations, relational practices, sustainable livelihood-making, and interspecies collaboration; becoming a variety of entities working side by side or together. In current times the need for social cohesion is again strongly felt. We thirst for togetherness to cope with an uncertain future and vulnerable social-ecological systems.

Inspired by the poetic communities operating during the Cold War across the world, Suns and Stars investigates the relationship between language, translation and community formation, based on the concept of ‘being-in-common’, in which the common is not a shared attribute but a process of ‘becoming-in-common’. Poet communities such as Black Mountain poets, Women’s Liberation Movement, Caribbean Artists Movement, Toronto Research Group, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe embodied and advanced emancipatory projects and linked their experimental writing to experimental ways of collective life and action. Like most of these communities, Suns and Stars departs from “a notion of the common that focuses not on identity but on the shared resources and tactics of collective labour.”¹

In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “wherever two or more cultures edge each other, … where the space between .. individuals shrinks with intimacy ... certain ‘faculties’ and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. The ‘alien’ element has become familiar –never comfortable, not with society's clamour to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, uncomfortable but home.”²

Although another geography shaped her experiences, we can trace in Anzaldúa's words similarities to the experiences of performing communities within the European context. Having faith in the vigor of a space where various cultures and narratives touch each other and engage in a process of ‘becoming-in-common’, we will not surrender to the idea that similitude is imperative for community. We are looking for alliances that “provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity”³ counteracting “the myth of cultural purity” and the “craving for the hygiene of oppositionality.” We will, in the words of Leela Gandhi, “exile to the chaos of a world without taxonomy.”⁴

In our previous project In the pause of a gesture there might be an echo #3, we wrote a curatorial text in imaginary transitive collaboration with the Toronto Research Group (TRG), in which we discuss how the act of translation is part of our artistic practice. (Here is the link to the text.) We reiterated the words of the TRG which say that translation is a communal act, one that acknowledges its transformation of sense and intercultural exchange.

In "We don’t want to be stars (but parts of constellations)"⁵ Suns and Stars is engaging in a process of ‘becoming-in-common’, by further deepening our research into the collaborative aspects of the act of translation. We are now looking at the Marineterrein as a space of collective experimentation. Marineterrein was until 2015 owned by the Ministry of Defence. Since then it has opened up. Now it is inhabited by local, military, and creative communities. Although the language spoken in the Marineterrein area is predominantly Dutch, we experienced that the variegated communities, based on respectively: care, defence, and change, do not understand each other's language. We are developing a research project in which the act of translation allows for a slow exploration and a deeper understanding of the words voiced in an unfamiliar language. Moreover, translation and translingual writing introduce a collective response to linguistic imperialism: the reconstruction of the dominance of one language over other languages.

For several years now, we have been exploring, together with artists, how art practices can function as a social space where other potentialities can be conceived and shaped. These forms of artistic/curatorial practice are radically different from the general idea of a curator ushering a ‘theme’, and artists who are impelled to function within this frame as ‘autonomous’ creators. The curatorial and artistic researches regarding 'the act of translation' and 'the concept of borderland' by respectively Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska are not meant to be a curatorial frame for the artists-in-residence, but a point of departure from which other artistic research and projects can sprout. For the artist-in-residency, we would like to invite artists who are not necessarily working with translation or borders, but who have relational practices. Artists, researchers, curators, and writers who develop their work in collaboration rather than in an autonomous space, thus inviting other people into their artistic practices.