From the question "what is the point to add another spectacle in the world?", together with Ion Dumitrescu we initiated Postspectacle around the practice of bringing the "outside spectacle" to art spaces (like inviting a military unit to do a dance workshop and a drill-performance in a dance venue), and around extending performative practices to the bigger stages: mass media, politics, entertainment (like trying to candidate to the presidency). With Alina Popa we created Artworlds, alternative art environments that challenge the modes of production and presentation and other implicit constraints of the art world - artworks as artworlds: Unsorcery, based on a dynamic of alienation from practice through thinking and from concepts through experience; Black Hyperbox, collaboration beyond consensus, not towards a common result, but towards amplifying each other on our divergent paths; Clinica overlaps contexts that don't belong together - the art space becomes a clinic where esthetic healing and performative therapies can happen.
Currently I develop "Artwork" as a method that borrows from somatic, spiritual, therapeutic techniques and aesthetics but it is centred on transforming artworks into practices. Works that are done mostly to be looked at are activated in the bodies of visitors / clients, are transformed into Artwork, because art shouldn't just be seen, it should be practiced, lived. Artwork is ambiguous, it can appear as performance, therapy, exhibition, workshop, promotional event, text, artwork or a combination of these, depending on the multiple contexts where it aims to function – art, philosophy, spirituality, therapy, education, alternative medicine, literature.
Central to Artwork are the (un)works Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, Collapse Yoga, Love. Love explores practices for embodying love – extrasensitive approaches to ordinary things, ecstatic affects, overwhelming feelings, subtle affective connections with things around – contrary to the contemporary "love", that can mean anything, from sex to empty corporate "care" slogans, but not so much the actual body experience of it. Through deviations from plausible body states and self-presentations, through performative anomalies that affect the automatic readings and perceptions, Unimages explores ways to move outside body images, identities, and outside our minds sometimes, affecting the implicit process of transforming reality into images and certainties. Love, Unimages and other recent (un)works are performed in art and non-art contexts where something else is already happening, audience mingling with people who are unaware of the performance. In Unofficial Unworks, the (un)works appear uninvited in important art events, at the same time, questioning and ignoring the artworld's implicit codes, protocols, structures of validation.
From everyday actions, to contemporary dance and performance, the default perspective is of a body as instrument, as tool. We control and put our bodies to do things, to work, to create images, to express ideas, we discipline and choreograph them, and this pattern extends to nature and entire reality. Dance is focused on movement and entertainment, visual arts on objects, images and discourse. I'm interested not that much in the body's capacity to produce content, but in the body as affect, body as medium, body as a portal towards the unknown. My practice is not centered on images but on a special body sensibility that can affect what is possible to see, think and do – is love based. It's a way of sensing, affecting or even creating the world. More than visual or conceptual, I see my recent practice as affect art.
Contact: florinflueras@gmail.com