“Slowly growing old”, a phrase by artist and writer Tim Etchells*, streamed into my apartment during the lockdown of Paris. Three words that referred to the actual moment, a lived reality, they seemed to exactly express how I felt: namely trapped. But also pointing out that there is still movement, that time continues streaming. Describing what happens when the passing of time becomes painfully visible by observing our nearest surrounding. The thought of sitting at home, in a physical distance to everybody else in this world for the coming 10 years crossed my mind several times.
This standstill, watching the world close down, definitely created a different relation to the experience of time. And anticipated an already existing proposal for this year’s edition of Moving in November: the invitation to share other temporalities.
Let’s think of something that might feel a little utopian right now. Let’s imagine that in the fall, after this summer, we can come back together, meet in person in a theater space, maybe with some distance, but still. Even if the life we lived before countries started locking down seems not to exist right now, we can always think about how we would like to meet back in the present moment and especially in the future.
Despite all the restrictions and limitations of the past months, the experience of time as an unstoppable stream brought us to where we are now. Something that makes me think of a phrase by stage designer and artist Jozef Wouters from his project The Soft Layer, shown in the Medina of Tunis**: “…If the only imaginable future is the past, then where are we now?“
We would still like to invite you to a festival that proposes another sphere of time, another rhythm. We ask you to drop out of time and space. To make time, to give us your time, to join in with time, and change your sense and perception of time. This time within a festival context. Meeting artists and their artistic proposals that strongly integrate the questions of temporality and duration into their works, in relation to us spectators and our gaze. Proposals that reflect our world, the different realities the artists and we are living in.
We are also curious to look into the far future; how will artists be translating the current global Pandemic into their art works. A crisis we surely all experience and live in different ways.
For now, we wish you all a beautiful summer and hope to find you back healthy in the fall.
Kindly,
Kerstin Schroth and the team of Moving in November
*From: End meeting for all – Episode 2 by Forced Entertainment. Streamed online: 08.05.20
** Shown in the frame of the festival Dream City, 2019.