Open Call | Virtual Workspaces by Wojtek Ziemilski

Set Reality Free
Online documentary performance workspace

A series of workshops under the general title Virtual Workspaces, become a symbolic, virtual workspace for artists to communicate.

True to its mission to forge links with important institutions beyond Greece’s geographical borders, to support the professionalization of younger artists and to offer opportunities of connections within the international artistic community, Onassis Stegi is co-organizing the project Virtual Workspaces.

Artists from diverse artistic backgrounds, maintaining a transdisciplinary approach to their practice, offer the opportunity of a creative working space, involving a group of professionals from various backgrounds.

Embracing the digital shift that we are experiencing, this series of online workspaces is to be seen as an area that aims to bolster cultural fermentation, to encourage creativity and to build constructive exchanges in relation to specific goals and problematics. It will strive to maintain interactive processes within this safe-space of a temporary, but so valuable virtual framework of a selected group of peers.

Each Virtual Workspaces workshop is designed to foster the circulation of ideas between professionals, very often also involving non-professionals, with the hope to provoke sustained engagement within each group, and nurture the potentiality of new collaborations beyond the frame of the digital environment.

We hope that Virtual Workspaces will prove especially useful in times of upheaval and uncertainty, and offer comfort when things feel out of control.

Application deadline: 21.10.2020

"Set Reality Free"

by Wojtek Ziemilski:

"One particular area of interest for this project is text and presence. Think: online. Now think: performing text, handwriting, typing, typing together, retyping, autofill, translation, reading out loud, acting, dictation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, formal games, visual poetry, toys, toys, toys! How can text contribute to translating reality into art? How does online liveness change text? What role can text play in live performance when it happens online? What is writing? What is reading? What are the performative possibilities of text?

Participants will be asked to bring short “documentary” texts they will be working with and sharing with others. Those can be documents, fragments of articles, other publications, or diaries, provided you yourselves could label them as “documentary”.

I am doing research around documentary performance online – and want to explore it with other people.

For three weeks we will work on the possibilities of building performances online. We will use Zoom and Google Drive, to work on personal, biographic, and other documentary material in radical ways. This will not be a set of lessons. Rather, it will be a set of laboratory sessions which I will guide. I’m looking for participants with experience in contemporary performance. Online performance experience is welcome!"