See www.specialissue.eu

In spring 2011, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers presented, during three days, about fifteen artistic dispositifs. Each of these, in its own way, generated forms of discourse in real time and in public. Conceived as a performed magazine, this Special Issue #0 came as a response to the recent multiplication of discursive performances. This development often takes place in the margins of more conventional production formats. We found it necessary to give it its own frame.

After Special Issue #0, we invited other artists and structures to take hold of this proposal and invent it anew, starting from a same question: "How does performance today publish discourse?". As is the case of Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, In-Presentable (Madrid), Station (Belgrade), Hybris Konstproduktion (Stockholm) and BIS (Istanbul) are structures created by artists in order to produce adequate environments for an art in the process of being invented. We all strive to maintain this relation through which the frame derives from a practice rather than the opposite.

Thanks to the support of the European Community, six issues will take place between June and December 2012. This diversity of forms and contents, as well as the cooperation between very different artists and structures, allows us to constitute an transnational platform within which each  issue reflects its own context while contributing to developing the general project.

By announcing a form that is not yet determined, although it might seem paradoxical, the project of a performed publication allows artists to leave aside, for a moment, the question of medium. For example, the suspension of parameters often understood as constitutive elements of performance, such as co-presence, the visibility of bodies or the determination of a finite temporal framework, makes way to the constitution of custom-made spaces for specific interrogations and affirmations. Indeed, motivations rather than form redefine practice.

The very nature of Special Issue demands a constant crossing over different scales. The artists engaged with Special Issue work across countries and form together an transnational community. This community develops a discourse, a set of questions, notions and articulations that feed and constitute it. In the same time these artists live "somewhere" and each one's political, economic, social, professional and personal context differs greatly depending of the place they inhabit. The public of each issue, with its expectations and concerns, varies as well. The meeting of practices ands concerns that are shared on a transnational level with the particularity of each context informs the very nature of the issue that it hosts.

This back-and-forth movement between forms and stakes of discourse, between local and transnational engagements is the very matter of the experimentations that Special Issue puts at play. For we are not interested in stabilizing a structure or assuring the permanence of a new frame; we strive to maintain in a state of questioning the possible lives of a discourse that is produced in public.


Alice Chauchat

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Project realized with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union