THIS IS A PLACE OF REST
Research and development of artistic activist manifestations of rest as resistance in places colonized by production, consumption and growth.
THIS
IS
A
PLACE
OF
REST
For the METROPOLIS Non-stop Landscapes symposium, I developed an activistic worshop-performance guiding the participants through resting with the past, the present and the potential futures of Refshaleøen, an old industrial site turned hip cultural venue and soon to be developed as part of the ongoing growth and expansion of Copenhagen.
The workshop 'This is a Place of Rest' explored how we can sink into a place, its material layers and stories and rest as a way to connect ourselves physically and mentally with them.
We rested in places shaped by logics of production, consumption and growth and with our resting bodies we opened other ways of being in the world.
we rest together here
to abstain from the
(hu)man made
universal law
of constant growth,
expansion,
production,
consumption…
we stop drilling
stop cutting
stop accessing, acquiring, achieving, breaching, blasting, bleaching, bombing, carving, cultivating, controlling, cracking, dominating, dragging, developing, dealing, exploiting, extracting, excavating, erecting, energizing, engineering, fuelling, fracking, funneling, farming, growthing, gearing, grabbing, heaving, hurrying, harnessing, hacking, inventing, invading, killing, moving, manipulating, networking, orchestrating, ordering, organizing, producing, preparing, pouring, peddling, pushing, promoting, progressing, quickening, quacking, refining, rigging, slitting, straining, storing, sampling, skimming, trapping, trawling, tearing, ushering, urging, vying, wringing, yangking
and wait for the world to come
to a grinding halt.
so we can follow the traces of our guts,
spilled too thinly across the global floor,
and find our way back to the womb/tomb
of our beginnings and ends.
resting, restoring.
one breath at a time.
as an antidote to extractivist logics of being and worlding
I hope to be part of creating a gentle revolution gathering people and places in chain reaction to lie down and resist growth and consumption; where even those who do not actively participate will reflect on the potential of rest.
Our planet's resources and creatures are exhausted. Rather than producing a new, grueling spectacle, I want use my artistic and human abilities and experiences to focus on rest as the most effective resistance in a world that celebrates productivity, exploitation and growth. Through workshops and smaller actions, a toolbox of practices is developed, and at the same time simple and effective stagings and tools are prepared that create strong images, help the participants to find rest in controversial places and make the actions moving to witness, also for those who do not participate themselves.