MARTIN HARGREAVES

I wonder if a good way to start is by maybe looking at the three terms that you’ve used in your research as proposals for curatorial action: repeating, interrupting, suspending. I wonder in the specifics of your research, what might repetition be? What might suspension be? What might interruption be?

SILVIA BOTTIROLI

It's interesting what you say, and which is also from my proposal, that these are proposals for curatorial action. At the same time, I ended up investigating these terms in artistic practices, and not so much in curatorial practices. Indeed, my interest in these three terms comes from looking at curatorial work and its relations, or how curatorial work always takes place within a given context, at the same time generating a different one. Maybe in this sense, interruption is a term that needs some other body, some other flow, rhythm or language, to interact with. The idea of suspension is also the creation of an alternative, different experience of time, and repetition is something that has to do with curatorial practice a lot. In the sense of curation as an instituting practice, and very much so as the practice of establishing something. Maybe I can try to articulate a little bit how I see these three terms in relation to curatorial action and then we can move to why I started by shifting focus to artistic practices? 

I think in relation to curation, repetition is at the same time the consistency of engaging with given frameworks, and especially with institutions, and cultivating a sense of instituting alternative practices. It is also this idea of always going back to a sense of an origin and to regenerating a gesture all over again. Interruption, in my curatorial practice, and in the curatorial practices I'm interested in, comes very much from an interest in what curation does when it proposes something, particularly into a space or a context which is not a theatre, and especially when addressing public space. Presenting performance in public space, and also in a museum or in another kind of venue, implies relating to places where something else is already happening, places where an audience or individuals and groups are already present, but not for the purpose of the performance itself. These are all contexts that have, in a way, their own language of how the body moves and how bodies encounter each other, or not, in the rhythms and dynamics of these movements. Public spaces are even more complex than that, because there is less dictation of which language of bodily encounter is operating; public space is potentially open for different ways of operating simultaneously within it. I am very much interested in how curation is a form of intervention that also operates by means of interruption, but which is not necessarily a disruptive and violent act. It is a form of proposing in a different language or a different tempo within something, an intervention within an existing fabric, or texture, of multiple encounters.

I remember at some point in one of the cohort meetings at Rose Choreographic School I realised that in this series of verbs of actions, then suspending, or suspension is perhaps not one of these actions, but is more of a result of what repetition and interruption produce, in terms of offering an experience of a suspended time. In a way, interruption and suspension can feel a bit similar but perhaps what I'm interested in is how both repetition and interruption can generate a different experience of time, which is an experience of a suspended time. In the sense of the event, philosophically, of a moment that we don't have a language for yet, or just a different thickness of time itself, which can be generated by changes in the rhythm, in the experience of rhythm itself. So maybe the suspension is not so much a practice for me, but rather something that I look forward to when working, or that really draws me in when I experience it in the encounter with artistic works. I also remember at some point someone brought up the notion of suspense, which I realised is not something that I had been thinking about. Maybe it is something I could or should address more, but that was not so present in my understanding of suspension. So, suspension for me is not looking forward to something that is coming, but more concerned with being in a place where everything is open. There is not such a sense of expectation or anticipation of something in particular, but rather a sense of a radical openness, of “anything might happen.”

MARTIN

It’s interesting because it feels like both repetition and interruption are dependent on certain regimes of visibility or recognisability. And I think when you talk about institutional practices, what we might think of as an institution is both formed and continues to form itself through repetition. Most the time it doesn't draw attention to that, it naturalises its operations through repetition, and an interruption is a moment of returning visibility to naturalised repetitions. But it feels like you're not necessarily proposing this binary of normative repetition and then disruptive interruption. You're saying both of these, as gestures, as practices, as actions can also somehow produce something of a suspension. I really like this idea of suspension, not as suspense, not as the anticipation of the arrival of the event. The suspense is the event. An awareness of the repetitions and the possibilities of interruption that have enabled a moment to appear. It’s not the moment before the jump scare in a horror film, which is suspense. Maybe, with your example of art in public spaces, it's that intervention into everyday rhythms that somehow affords a whole set of awarenesses. It’s a sensory suspension but not the suspension of senses - smell, touch, sight, they all become available to me in a way that's that if I was just walking through that street on an ordinary day and nothing was intervening in that space, they wouldn't necessarily be available to me. I agree it is not a disruptive or violent interruption necessarily but it is a gesture towards reciprocal awareness. It makes me think about what Steve Paxton said dancing is, and dancing for him is a moment where he becomes aware of his body, but not self-conscious, it’s an opening and an availability that is different from technical skill. He said he was always chasing it, because the better he became at a particular form then dancing seemed to elude him, because certain kind of techniques of repetition dull the senses in a way. They dull awareness. They don't afford this suspension. We don’t have to relate to choreography and dance just because we're in the Rose Choreographic School, but there is something interesting here in terms of a full bodily availability that happens in this moment of suspension.

SILVIA

Oh yes. I think for me, it's very much about that. Also what you said about the interruption and the example of public space – I think I'm very much interested in these gestures that do not occupy a space, do not erase what is already there, do not invisibilise or substitute it with something else, but rather explore ways of cohabitation with what is already there, through cohabiting, or by adding one more layer to reality – then this layer also allows us to become more sensitive. Sensitive to the other layers of reality that are always there in a way, or to look at them differently, which is maybe indeed a matter of visibility or awareness, and it has very much to do with senses.

MARTIN

But it's interesting also how your position now, as you've moved through the research, you're understanding the suspension isn't an action that's performed by either the curator or the artist. The suspension is, in some way, the state that can be approached. So I can't suspend something, but I can work on repetition and interruption as a means to maybe approach suspension?

SILVIA

Exactly. I think that's exactly also what was not clear to me when initially I proposed these three terms. While working, I discovered that this third one I can't see as an active operation, but rather as a desirable, and sometimes desired or not, result of some practice and something that happens very much in the practice of spectating, in the spectators, which is in the end, the position that both curators and artists engage and work with. So that's also where these two practices, artistic and curatorial practices, collide in that they are both working to generate some of conditions for experience, for spectators. 

MARTIN

That’s interesting, because often that moment of suspension is framed as a potential didactic moment. I'm thinking of particular histories of street theatre in the UK, it's a moment where a political message might be inserted, it’s a teachable moment. I don't think is what you're speaking about. But it's interesting about that there is often an awareness of this moment of suspension. But there seems to be strong discourse around the instrumentalising of suspension, for didactic purposes, to tell the audience something they are assumed not to know. It seems from what I've experienced of your research so far, suspension is an invitation to an audience but it’s not a moment of instruction?

SILVIA

Absolutely. And I think it's really the invitation for an audience, or maybe for individual spectators even, to generate their own experience. My line of thought comes very much from the concept of emancipation as articulated by Jacques Rancière. Which, for me, also calls for moving a step backwards for both the curator and the artist - not creating an experience, but creating the conditions for spectators to generate their own experience, and then to also generate their own meanings or significance in relation to what they are attending or they are participating in. And I think I'm very fascinated by this, by the moments when I happen to have an experience like that at the theatre. Also by the potential of even small curatorial choices and gestures which enhance something that I think only happens in the encounter with an artwork. So, in that sense, that’s why I had to look at artistic practices even more closely, because that's where it happens. But then curatorial choices can support or enhance this possibility very much, by making decisions in terms of space, time, constellation and composition of a programme.

MARTIN

Yes, in the Rancière notion of emancipation, he's writing against both kinds of Brechtian and Autaudian models of theatre, which both work on this notion of encounter, that the encounter has this special potency. But he's suggesting that that those two dominant trends within 20th century experimental theatre try to instrumentalise the production of a particular awareness of value, ethics and politics in that moment. The potency of the encounter isn’t enough for these modes of theatre – it has to be used to coerce an audience towards an awareness. I've also been reading recently Franco Bifo Berardi and his distinction between connection and conjunction. And he writes about connectivity and how it allows for data transfer and allows for all kinds of speeds, but actually conjunction can only be attended to when we share space and time and we sit with the awkwardness of that. Not awkwardness for its own sake or as its own value, but because the differences within this shared time and space can't be resolved into speed or into one direction of information flow. This brings me back to your work on rhythm and I think that's why it seems potent to call it suspension, because it's not a moment that can speed up and deliver quickly, it is the moment of encounter, which I think perhaps is why you've been focusing a lot on theatrical and performance work. I mean I guess it's also in photography and it’s in other art forms? It can be in an encounter in a gallery, but I wonder, I wonder if, for you, there is something specific about performance?

SILVIA

Absolutely, and it very much has to do with the experience, the inherent experience of time that is there in performance, and the question exactly of the awkwardness of attending something together. This question of speed in relation to connection, made me think that most of the performances that immediately come to my mind, among the ones that I am engaging in the research, actually have a rather slow tempo, or maybe even through acceleration and speed, then they generate some other perception — as if the sense of extreme vitality and high tempo generates a sensation of stillness almost, some sort of suspended stability of time. Performance is an art where time is, I would say, one of the main materialities, and is also one of the materialities for the spectator who is directly engaged by the artwork. We don't usually decide about our time in the experience of theatre, performance or dance, in the way we do in front of a photo, a painting or anything like that. That's, to me, a big difference. And, as banal as it sounds, the fact that we attend this art form together with others, often in darkness — this is also, to me, really specific to the kind of experience that I'm interested in, and also overall why I'm engaged with this art form and not others, as a curator.

MARTIN

So this comes back, maybe, then to how you've been thinking about rhythm? Because rhythm isn't necessarily like the notion of a pulse, or the distribution of attention across metered time? It sounds like what your research is focusing on is rhythm, or maybe more specifically polyrhythms? It's partly thinking through how a performance might afford a certain kind of rhythmic intervention into our day. But these encounters are parts of broader systems of rhythms of attention, rhythms of awareness. Maybe can you say a bit more about how your thinking around rhythm has developed?

SILVIA

I've been circling around rhythm, but I haven't fully addressed it in the research so far. Definitely the question of polyrhythm, which you mentioned, is the first thing that comes to my mind thinking of rhythm, together with idiorrhythmy as well, a concept I first read about in Roland Barthes. He writes about communities and collective environments, contexts where different, idiosyncratic, individual rhythms are welcomed and made possible, and at the same time how this ends up creating another sense of what it means to share rhythm, which for me, also goes back to the question of institutions, to collective work, which curatorial work is, and also to the political work that we do. The question of how we might live together, how we might sit together in a theatre with an understanding of polyrhythm or idiorrhythm, how we sit and attend something with both different and shared rhythms. So in that sense, I'm not searching for, or I'm not particularly interested in, practices that produce one experience or impose one rhythm, but rather, again, create an awareness of the different rhythms that are there, either within the artwork itself or between the performance and the rhythm of the city, for example, or the individual rhythms of the people attending it. I'm now thinking of this fascination that returns in many of the practices that I'm looking at, that are engaging moving images like the cinema, or images like photos, and are also generating new images, images that belong to different times and have different rhythms themselves.

I could dive into rhythm as a word and into rhythmic practices a bit more - I keep thinking of The Waves by Virginia Woolf, which was one of my starting points in this artistic curiosity, around rhythm and the rhythm of writing. As part of my research, I am attempting some writing myself, and I’m reading a lot of poetry, which I think has to do both with the question of suspension, and with a desire for an experience of rhythm in in the world and the images that it produces, rather than, let’s say, in critical theory or other forms of analysis.

MARTIN

I’m now thinking about Michel de Certeau’s text Walking in the City. I remember that he writes about walking as poems that we write but we cannot read, as we walk through a city. I think the chapter begins at the top of the World Trade Center in New York and he's looking at the grid plan, the grid of New York, and he’s proposing that there’s a difference between city planning, or urban planning, with a certain notion of efficiency of movement, and the individual, rhythmic negotiation of space. But I think he is using this idea of rhythmic writing. It means that you're writing poems in the city as you walk, through your negotiation of space, partially through the way that you start to link things that you see, not necessarily consciously, you're creating your own city, within a city. It’s connected with the pace, the rhythm of walking, which seems quite resonant with this idea of encounter.

SILVIA

Yes, and this image of the grid of the city, the urban planning versus the experience of walking in it, has a lot to do also with curatorial practice. For example, planning a programme and designing a certain map of a festival, while knowing that the reality of the experience will be made by how people navigate, and make choices, and miss things, or see things twice. How this experience of attending intertwines with everyday life, or the suspension of everyday life, if somebody is visiting for example. This relation between a kind of score or a structure and the movement also comes back very much to choreography and dance and their relationships as well. This is maybe one understanding of the choreographic in curatorial practices; the choreographic which is not imposing a grid onto something but is creating a grid as a support structure for plans to grow. For navigation, and the forms of writing, which are unpredictable and highly idiosyncratic and personal. So a programme is made of what is already written and what is being written.

Because you brought up Michel de Certeau, and Walking in the City, I’m thinking about how he writes around tactics as way of navigating, as opposed to strategies, which is also something that, for me, comes back often in my thinking around curatorial practices. What would be a tactical way of working, and how can tactics open up to prefiguration, or open up to potentiality somehow, which is another word for this suspension we’re talking about?

MARTIN

Because of the way we're having this conversation right now, I'm aware of repetitions that that also enable my ability to think around the notion of repetition. Thinking partially about the way that both of us cite pre-existing ideas as structures. This is one form of repetition, canonical repetition, which both enables, for me, lots of thinking, lots of moving. But there’s also the question of what it might be actually to interrupt that and recognise the tradition that reinserts itself every time it's repeated. There's a reification that happens through repetition, I think also in terms of museums, in terms of festivals, in terms of theatres, there's a set of cultural values that gets sedimented through repetition. So interruption can also be a means of, maybe, critique; a critique of how value gets ascribed and how certain thoughts and experiences are enabled through structures of repetition, but also certain thoughts and experiences are excluded through those, even before we get to the moment of suspension. There’s a force of normativity is instituted through practices of repetition. I'm just wondering if in your research, you've been thinking about how it matters who you bring in - who is there in the research? Who is not in the research?

SILVIA

Yeah, I very much recognise in myself, also, what you say in relation to references. I know I'm going back to the same things somehow, and it's a way of re-understanding. I feel I'm not done with some of the things I have read and it's a real question to what extent I am capable of bringing in other forms of thinking which operate very differently. As much as I understand, in general terms, how important it is that we are pay attention to which kinds of knowledge we reinforce and reiterate, I also wonder if there are some tools, thoughts and epistemologies that I can operate within because these have made me and I'm not done with them yet. Maybe the question is how to create conditions for encountering something else, which would be exactly this interruption that we are talking about, now also in one's thinking process. An interruption in how one does research or how one makes choices in relation to that, and I think for me this is really a critical point in this research. When I decided to ground the research in strong personal encounters with certain art forms, it definitely also says a lot about what I've seen and what I have not seen and what had an impact on me, because I was prepared for that encounter in one way or another, and what didn't. For sure other works, other artists and also other texts or theoreticians might become central in a research like this, but not in my research about this, because I’m choosing to start from personal encounters.

At the moment it is a bit of a tough negotiation with this kind of research, which is different from my usual writing and editing practice or the kind of more public discourse that one creates in curation. It's a more personal research practice, or some something that I understand as a space for myself to keep thinking,…Being part of Rose Choreographic School and in a cohort of people who definitely bring other knowledges and other references as well can be one way, and maybe for me, a more generative way, to question my choices. Rather than proactively searching for an encounter with thoughts or art forms that actually by myself I cannot encounter, I realise now that I need others to bring them in. Which is also something that happens in the examples that that I started working on as artistic practices, with images brought in by others: different references come with much more significance and potency, if they come through somebody else, rather than in a way me deciding or knowing I should search for references in other directions.

MARTIN

Yeah, that makes sense to me, because it feels like also if I were to go to look for references that have not yet spoken to me, then I'm still doing that within my own epistemologies. I'm appropriating and not actually allowing that encounter with otherness to shake or interrupt. I don't think that removes any responsibility from me. I mean, I think particularly in terms of education, I do feel it is important that I question the references that I use, but I like how you've just articulated it, because I think it is about encounters with alterity, without incorporating that alterity, without already knowing the other and bringing the other into myself. It’s allowing a certain kind of, well I guess another moment of suspension. I can't suspend my own epistemologies. I have to be interrupted in some way so that then I can start to experience something outside of my own patterns of repetition. It's very difficult to speak about this moment of interruption without domesticating it through a language that I already have. But I enjoy this - how you see both the importance but also the limitations on being able to question my choices. But actually, part of me just needs to trust that in, for example, lectures with students they will do it. They will do that anyway. So actually, what I need to do is build in space and time in those sessions for the encounter with the things that the students bring with them.

SILVIA

Yeah - of course, this might happen or not, depending also on how you facilitate this encounter and how actively you ask them. In curation, it becomes, I think, more problematic, because then we are in a position of power, and there are asymmetries which make it more important to be cautious, or very aware about that. I wonder if, in terms of a research project like mine, it makes more sense that I work within the specificity of what I can bring, as artists do when they work. Then it's for somebody else to eventually locate this in a broader landscape and give it a position that is not dominant. For me this space of the research is very much a space of freedom and of specificity, and I think I've been longing for it for a long time. I’ve been operating more often in positions of responsibility, where I’m constantly making choices about who is invited, who is given space, either in education or in curation. As a curator, I would not imagine asking an artist to decolonise their references when they're making a work, no matter what the references are, no matter where the artist is from. When you invite an artist, you are very much interested in the specificities of the particular references and epistemologies that each artist brings, and then through curation you are creating a space where different epistemologies can coexist, creating a broader context which relativise and entangles them — or not. So, I think, for me, this research is very much a space of doing my thing in my way, without taking on the responsibility of a framework for it yet. I would be very happy to have a practice that then someone else can eventually decide to present or to engage in one form or another, and to put it into a broader framework. I feel as the curators we become relays – as Frie Leysen used to say we are a hyphen connecting an audience and artists. In this sense, curators become something that things go through, and curatorial responsibility is very much centred around questions like: How do I look at work that is based on epistemologies that are far from mine? What draws me towards certain works and not others? It’s many questions, and I think there's different strategies, or different ways of engaging that within curation. So, in coming from this kind of practice, and the importance of those curatorial questions, then when moving into my research practice it was very important for me, and even very liberating somehow, to gently claim a space for one particular thing that is the one I want to do. And see how this changes the way I then work in other contexts, or I understand myself in other contexts.

MARTIN

In the iterations of the lecture presentation that I've seen, there's an explicit avowal of your positionality. It's not an expressive or autobiographic focus, but it is a location within a certain kind of positionality. I think this roots the research practice in a different kind of gesture than a large institutional curatorial practice would do, because you begin by inviting us to understand that part of the responsibility for the linkages between these images is a personal responsibility. You’re exploring certain kinds of affinities and seductions by images that, because you locate it within a personal positionality, it means you also avow that you cannot know everything about these movements. The affinities are not predetermined narratives. I think there's something within curatorial and educational positions where there's supposed to be more transparency of the knowledge that you're both engaging in and producing. Transparent to you and to whoever is encountering it. Whereas I think when you work from a more individual research position, you can actually say that I don't fully know why I'm drawn to this image, and the point of the research isn't to fully articulate that kind of knowledge. It's instead to follow, it's to follow how the affinity is drawing you in. Its main goal isn’t to analyse critically, open up and then deconstruct it. It's actually to understand something of the experience of following the links. I think when I teach, I definitely establish and follow links, but I'm always trying to expose them as much as possible, to make other links possible to suggest that my links only operate to reveal larger structures of understanding which are not only mine.

SILVIA

Yes, and as you maybe remember from conversations and sharings of the research, in the beginning this shift was the thing I was busy with. I was asking where I situate my legitimacy in the practice of following, rather than in analysing or making transparent. It is still a question that I have. It is maybe also a matter of curatorial ethics: I believe that as curators we have to safeguard space for artists to to fully be in the space of the encounter, and I think you do that by not foregrounding your own curatorial interest too much — or that's very much how I work. In general, I would say I'm not particularly interested in curators that foreground their own research questions. Although I can definitely recall experiences of attending programmes, and maybe exhibitions in particular, where you feel that there is such a strong curatorial presence, you feel personal obsessions, or an interest that is very specific, and that enables exactly the kind of experience that I would want to enable. But how to balance that with centering the art, is for me a very present question. Also, thanks to the framework of the Rose Choreographic School, where we are all called artists, I felt I could take a position that I definitely would not normally take in other contexts. I am still feeling there is something very nourishing and very generative in this position. I’m very interested in how this can affect the way I work and understand myself in more institutional contexts, and my professional practice. In the beginning, for me, this research was a separate, alternative kind of platform for a curation than programming or festival making. In the end, of course, I see that there are many conversations going on, both ways. In the research, I'm approaching works that have collaborated with, curated or presented, but also I ended up working on at least one performance that we then presented in Short Theatre this year - the work of Nasim Ahmadpour and Ali Ashgar Dashti. I was so much into it from a research perspective, that it became inevitable to invite it, if I had the opportunity to do so. I can't foresee yet which forms the intersection between research and curatorial practice can take, but I think it's a real question for me at the moment of how much this space needs to be separate and claimed as personal research, or how I shall acknowledge and embrace certain porosity and exchange that happens between this and the actual curatorial work that I'm doing.

MARTIN

I wonder if the notion of intuition is useful here, although I don't know if that's the best name for it! A concept I don't want to argue away, or analyse away is, is artistic intuition. I also don't want to elevate it to being a divine spark, but it’s quite difficult to account for in language, necessarily, or in an exposed analysis of process. There are so many calls to document process, to expose decision making, particularly when artistic research enters the PhD frame for example, then does this mean every single decision has to be able to be articulated? Because in some ways, I think it's, sometimes, super interesting to not do that and trust that maybe then some other form of articulation is possible further down the line. The idea that every decision should be fully transparent and fully conscious, fully able to be defended, seems to be in tension with actually how I experience artists working. I think it also goes back to this notion of suspension, because if we don't treat suspension as purely a didactic moment, as purely this moment of analysis, but instead this moment where we actually tune into sensation then suspension is not necessarily always going to be available to be instrumentalised. Something happens, that cannot be fully analysed. This might sound a very grand thing to claim, but maybe this is one of the values of art, because it's not necessarily data, it's not necessarily information, It's not necessarily instruction, but it is an experience.

SILVIA

Yeah, to me, what you're saying is super important, and it’s very much at the core of why I do what I do as a way to enable these possibilities, to enable sensation, to enable something that cannot be articulated fully, and cannot be instrumentalised. I think it's really core for me, and still something that I'm grappling with. To me, intuition is an important word. It's so much based on something that I don't have a better name for, something that I cannot fully explain, or I’m not fully aware of. I think it's important to reclaim this, also in a curatorial practice where, over the last years, we have increasingly built up and operated within a political language, much more than an artistic language. I think it is fundamental that we reclaim a language that is artistic, that we reclaim forms of choice-making in curatorial work, in how we combine certain artistic works together that is not about articulation only. These choices are not didactic, and they're not meant to create pedagogical moments, or moments of understanding, of explanation, or even of the sharing of a knowledge that already exists. Curatorial choices as I understand them, are intended to generate something that can only happen in these encounters, and we have to trust this can happen, and might also not happen. For me, the need to reclaim artistic language also applies to artists: often artists are required to write and talk in a language that is not theirs, but it's very much the language of applications, and so on. And although curation sits in between, let's say, artistic, cultural and political realms, it is important to reclaim, also for curatorial practices other languages and other forms of operation that are not based on data transmission, or instructions, or what you call the didactic moment.

My interest in cultivating a space of research within a consistent curatorial practice has maybe to do with a sense of a repetition, not as the confirmation of a given norm but instead as going back to things all over again. Research as finding a place of origin, to value and honour the encounters that happen, but also instituting something else in the normative practices of the institutions and contexts that we work in. A counter movement to other forms of repetition and institutionalisation, which are going on in how in our field we think of ways of working, of collaboration, of solidarity and much more.

Something that is becoming more and more important for me lately is imagination. This moment of suspension I am searching for is very much a moment of imagination, at the same time individual and collective: a moment of enabling a capability, which is an imaginative capability – an imagination that does not operate within the frameworks of what is already offered, of what is already possible, but one that is generating an altogether different, or much broader, framework for itself. I don't think imagination is a word that I have engaged so much in the last year of research, and maybe there is also hesitation towards this word for me, but there is definitely something to explore in the link between intuition, sensation and imagination. Maybe these are another three terms I could add to the research!

MARTIN

There’s something about these terms that they don’t get captured by recognition. Maybe imagination isn't fully understood as soon as it offers itself? There's a possibility of new horizons of thinking, feeling, sensing, without relying on certain romantic notions of the sublime?

SILVIA

Exactly. I think it can be very ordinary. It's not necessarily sublime, but it is a sense of opening. 

MARTIN

Maybe that's a good place to stop, with the suspense of an opening.

This text is part of Silvia Bottiroli’s research project “Repeating, Interrupting, Suspending” granted by the Italian Council program (2024).