Letting the Days Go By: MONDAY PROGRAM

Poste Restante: CALL HOME
Mon 18 June, 18:00-21:00

How do you fillet a fish? Get over a heart-break? Remove a tic? If you have burnt the bottom of a cooking pot, can it be saved? How do you repair a bicycle chain? Shine shoes? Prepare for a disaster?

Call home! At our temporary phone booth café at Index you have the possibility to make a brief call ”home”, to one of our assigned operators. They stand ready to accept your call.

Call Home is the first part of an ongoing social project in which Poste Restante work in collaboration with The Non-Existent Center. In a time of polarization and detachment, Call Home aims to serve as a messenger between the rural and urban areas, across generations and past trajectories. Call Home addresses our most human need of attachment; how every day experiences can be regarded as competence and serve as a basis for identification.

POSTE RESTANTE is a Swedish performance company that creates immersive performances that take the form of unexpected but honest running activities. The individual visitor holds the position of being the main character as well as the final receiver, and is invited to, with maintained integrity, reflect upon complex questions in concrete ways. The performances do not offer the visitor any pre-maid solutions, but a space to dwell on difficult questions and navigate within herself. Met with respect for her specific circumstances each visitor is offered an opportunity to take her emotions seriously. http://www.poste-restante.se/

Image credit: Conny Fridh with festival vectorisation

Caitlin Dear with Thomas Schmocker: TREE TIME
Mon 18 June, 18:00-21:00

Have you ever hung out with a tree? Read them a poem… Posed them a question…Made them a promise…?

Tree Time is an encounter between human and tree. You are warmly invited into this participatory, live work that involves spending time with trees; working towards interspecies collaboration, sensitivity and companionship.

The work stems from a practice that is part of Caitlin’s everyday life and involves intuitively, yet consciously, interacting with trees. Approached by one human individual, the practice becomes social through its agenda of reciprocity and exchange between human and tree.

Caitlin will introduce you to the practice as you walk outdoors together to meet a tree whom you will be left in company with. As shared with you through audio instructions from a headset, you will be offered a pathway into enacting this practice.

With roots from Romanticism – and in a reappraisal of Romantic ideologies – Tree Time encourages subjective experiences of the sublime and pure interactions with nature. Exploring what these terms could mean today, and looking to discover what the renewal of such perspectives might propose to current ecological and sociological paradigms.

Letting The Days Go By will be the first public showing of Tree Time; an ongoing artistic project that undergoes continual re-framing and re-development.

Caitlin Dear is an artist, currently based between Stockholm (Sweden) and Melbourne (Australia), working through choreography, performance, and practice-based research. Her work engenders a sense of clinical wonder and focused multiplicity; creating possibility for audiences to ponder philosophical problems, from an embodied perspective with a scientific sensibility. Working choreographically with movement, attention, text, sensory stimulation and relations, Caitlin creates performances and live works. These are developed from outcomes and methods within her research practices. Through immersive or participatory elements, she often seeks to engage audiences with the concepts of her work first hand. She has worked in the Australian context within the settings of organisations including Melbourne Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Dancehouse, Arts House, Testing Grounds and MPavilion.

Sound designer, performer, collaborator and Victorian College of the Arts graduate, Thomas Schmocker’s, various projects reflect his restless nature and multifarious interests. Trained in sound design,his highly collaborative nature and thirst for intensive first hand experience has led him to various heights; from the feminist aggression of No Blank Stares (2016), created and performed with frequent collaborator Kaitlyn McConnell to the collective dream-state of his first solo show as writer/performer, Black Warhols (2017). Acting as dramaturg on Caitlin Dear’s Qualia (2017) and ethereal conversationalist in his own live performance-sculpture Hold Please (2018) at Testing Grounds, live performance and the incorporation of performance art concepts remain central to his craft. His art-punk band Bikini Wax are currently working on their first recordings.

Thomas and Caitlin’s collaboration propels objects into a clear blue sky, where things are as they are. Clarified and distilled, they fall back into contact with the earth, reacting and available to all encounters.