With the 19th edition of the festival Improspections, temporarily renamed as AfterWorld, we mark five years since the official start of the Covid-19 pandemic In aftereffects of which we continue to live, work through, and create within. Five years later, we reflect on the forms of artistic, dance, theoretical, and organizational practices, survival, thought, and feeling shaped in and by post-pandemic material and its affective conditions. Five years later we witness daily the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Five years later amid the rise of censorship in the cultural field we do not turn our eyes from this reality.

In this political moment we are continuing our exploration of improvisation as both an artistic and life practice, we turn towards artistic expressions that resist and break through form. Our focus is on affirming artistic practices on the margins of dance and at the boundaries of performance disciplines. We attune to the rhythm of change and disruption—a rhythm that French philosopher Catherine Malabou refers to as destructive plasticity: a transformation that violently reshapes matter into a new state, irreconcilable with the one preceding it.

Through the festival program named AfterWorld, we gather dance and interdisciplinary artists and cultural practitioners of broad interests, who engage with the spaces between dance, poetry, game, text, and performance. AfterWorld is a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Embracing enigmatic, magical, and broadly material practices, we imagine a festival program open to fabulation, and see the space of performance and dance as a site of connection with the invisible, the unknown, the nonexistent, the unspeakable, the unclear, and the non-living.

AfterDeath

Proposing a theme for a festival, as with any other artistic endeavor, inevitably comes from a desire to respond to urgency. It’s often a need to provide a relevant response to burning social issues or causes—to trace an emerging field of knowledge in the context of the times we are (supposedly) facing together. But what happens when the theme itself is the unknown? What does this do to knowledge? How, where, by whom, and through what means is knowledge situated within a field as elemental — so universal as death?

How can we approach the supposed universality of death and dying starting from its cultural framing in the Westernized world—focusing primarily on its minor narratives? Minor as opposed to the major narratives: those of nation-states, their heroes and mythologies—epistemologies that always already interpret death as the opposite of life. How can we center and privilege the everyday presence of death as an integral part of life, as life’s companion? As life-death. What do we do with the violent effects of unspoken death and the un-naming of the dead? This unspeakability leaves a hole in our language and shatters our habits. Through what means can we un-forget, remember, and care for our dead?

We are guided by the thoughts of Belgian theorist Vinciane Despret, who critically examines the notion of mourning as a process of release or overcoming. Despret questions the deeply rooted idea of death as an unpassable frontier—a final and absolute rupture between life and death—and instead proposes an understanding of death as a porous, permeable line through which relationships do not cease, but continue, transformed, in different ways. In many communities she engages with, the dead are not perceived as absent, but as present in a different form: in dreams, everyday signs, rituals, or as a persistent feeling that they continue to shape our daily decisions and emotions. Despret invites us to take this relational dimension of death seriously: not as a return to superstition, but as a way of thinking and living in which the dead remain co-participants in life. In this way, death is not silence or nothingness, but a discontinuity filled with meaning—a space for lasting, albeit altered, relationships.

The artists of AfterTheWorld are mostly practitioners of a continuous engagement with the unknown, the invisible, and the inexplicable. They, like Catalina Insignares, Carolina Mendonça, Aron Levente and Ashkan Sepahvand, understand art as the space of as if. Thus opening us to a particular kind of attention within which it seems possible to translate experiences from the other side. Their work holds space for the vacillation that connects this world and the other. Versed in the art of playful fakery, they act as guardians of enigma.

AfterEnd

The Covid-19 pandemic, like the AIDS pandemic, hasn’t actually ended. There was no announcement of its conclusion. The Westernized world simply returned to the groove of routine—we just redirected our attention from other modes of existence back to the familiar ones—but something did, in fact, end.

Speaking of the End of the Worlds, Italian theorist Federico Campagna invites us to consider the present moment as something already belonging to the past. According to his cosmological model, we are living at the end of an era (rooted in rationalism) that began sometime in the 17th century. The end of this world, for Campagna, doesn’t necessarily represent a catastrophe (from a civilizational perspective), but rather an opportunity for “us,” as cultural workers at the end of this history, to leave behind cultural artifacts for a new era that transmit alternative values. Campagna’s optimism rests on the idea that our reality is plastic—that it is shaped willingly through language. If the world we have inhabited until now has been constructed from the technological and the rational, Campagna invites us to introduce the magical and the unknown into it. Even if that means lying to those who come after us.

Unlike more optimistic notions of plasticity that celebrate adaptability and regeneration as solutions, Catherine Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity describes a negative psychosomatic capacity through which the matter of body and psyche changes to the point of irreversible transformation. Not just transformed, but destroyed, without the possibility of restoration or even backtracking to a prior state. In this sense, death, as well as experiences like trauma, illness, and loss—are forces of discontinuity. They don’t merely interrupt life in a biological sense; they also shape a new state of emptiness. Malabou thus calls us to confront the destructive dimension of change—not one that opens up space for something new, but one that leaves behind silence, void, and the unrecognizable other .

Reference

Vinciane Despret - Our Grateful Dead
Catharine Malabou - Ontology of the Accident
Dionne Brand - Nomenclature for the time being
Federico Campagna - Prophetic Culture