Staging

As September’s guest editor for A*DESK, I propose thinking of the stage as a space where something can be rehearsed and begin to exist. Scenography, performance, curating, dance, and ritual are all practices capable of producing relationships and forms of knowledge, but they are also tools for imagining other ways of inhabiting, building community, and remembering the past, present, and future. Staging is representing but it can also create the conditions for something to begin to be constructed and to happen.

The four texts gathered here come from very different places but share a single idea, namely, that the stage and its methodologies are spaces of possibility, existence and, above all, of resistance and memory. Scenography can thus be understood as rehearsal, as displacement, as fiction, or as an infrastructure of care.

We begin this issue with Roger Badia, who discusses the relationship between architecture and scenography and the conditions of rehearsal. Through the architecture of Aldo Rossi, especially his San Cataldo Cemetery and the Teatro del Mondo, the text explores how a temporary or displaced construction, detached from its original function, can still open itself to other uses and other ways of inhabiting. Architecture thus appears as a stage capable of being activated by those who traverse it, while the performative dimension is presented as a tool for anticipating possibilities for the transformation of public space.

Júlia Coelho situates her own curatorial practice within in-between spaces. Drawing on Lygia Clark’s Linha Orgânica and the practices of Susana Solano and Ángeles Marco, she conceives of curating as an interval where the boundaries between inside and outside, body and space, artist and public, past and present, are unstable. Curating thus appears as a performative practice, a way of moving between artworks, archives, places, and temporalities in order to produce knowledge through movement.

Next, Jordi Mani Huesca traces a genealogy of interconnected memories across communities by means of the body, sound, ritual, and what is left behind. Through Bonkó ñánkue and Abakuá, and their connections to Detroit techno and Harlem ballroom, he proposes thinking of dance and music as technologies capable of preserving and updating memory. In contexts of displacement, precarity, violence, and extractivism, these practices allow for the generation of community, protection, belonging, and parallel economies of care.

We end this month with the film Flaming Ears, in which Tendai John Mutambu akes us through the construction of a world via its set design. Faced with a city and a reality that could not contain ways of life imagined by its protagonists, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, and Dietmar Schipek built the fictional city of Asche using models, sets, costumes, music, effects, and a profoundly collective and DIY production. The set design here ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes a tool for self-construction. If the existing world doesn’t offer the desired space, there’s always the possibility of building another one, even if it’s made with cardboard, scraps, costumes, with the help of a few accomplices.

From architecture to curatorial practice, from design models to dance floors, these four texts see the stage as a place of transformation. For them, staging is a way of creating and preserving space. It’s also a way of rehearsing what we don’t yet know how to inhabit. Perhaps the theatre, as well as its methodologies and disciplines, isn’t so much about representing a world as it is about generating and imagining the conditions for others to emerge.

(Featured Image: Susana Solano, La linterna I, 2002-2003. Parque del Prado Collection. Vitoria-Gasteiz TownHall)