Radical Hope

Post/Pandemics

Co-production

Residencies

04.12 > 09.12.2023
09.11 > 13.11.2023
27.10 > 30.10.2023

Post/Pandemics (P/P) is a project initiated by radical_hope (Heike Langsdorf) in 2022, with the vague aim to come to a co-creation, with and by a yet unfixed group of people, in 2024. This two year process started off with a couple of questions that got more and more diversified along the way by a slowly growing group of participants.

What would a ‘post’-pandemic life look like?
How do we stay and act in it?
How do we understand it?
And how do we read the prefix ‘post’ when it comes to misgovernment of the world and its resources?

After a first trajectory, Summer Refuge (August 2022 @De Markten, Brussels) Post/Pandemics adopted a seasonal work rhythm. Until December 2023 radical-hope sets up so-called Refuges at various locations where people can meet ‘by chance’: open spaces for which Heike Langsdorf and Simone Basani initiate changable circumstances to engage in a variety of (artistic) practices or just hang out.

Rather than using calls for participation, selection processes, or strategies to ensure diversity or exclusivity, Post/Pandemics prefers to rely on chance in inviting people into a process of exploration: an exploration of what happens when we do NOT obsessively search for solutions to problems, achievements, results, or umtimate alternatives to the status quo. Freed from the pressure to produce the aforementioned, we might find ways to live satisfying life/s…
The Summer- and Winter Refuge explored the question of how a group becomes a group, how a group meets other groups, and how the concept of social integration is itself a highly questionable one:
How can one counter the assumption that there is such a thing as a clear-cut society to which the other must conform?

The two Spring Refuges in 2023 came to question how (as a yet unfixed group of people) we negotiate the space/s we find ourselves in? Figuring this out in practice instead of through merely theoretical speculation, an understanding of what we can mean or not mean for eachother could slowly develop and lead to next questions:
What is there and always already available for us? How can we hold together the things that hold us together? How do we read the traces surrounding us, left by ourselves or others?

During the fall, three last Refuge Intensives are organised in residency at KWP Brussels and at radical_house. Unlike the preceding Public Refuges, these Intensives invest into a rather intimate working sphere where participants (who have found their way to the project during the last two years) can deepen their way of relating to the material generated and the way they would like to contribute to the closure of the process.

Radical-Hope.

production: radical_hope I coproduction: De Markten/VGC Brussels, BUDA, KAAP, Forsiti’A, Flemish Community, Kunstenwerkplaats I initiation, choreograpy, mediation: Heike Langsdorf I initiation, dramaturgy, production: Simone Basani I assistance, communication, mediation: Alice Ciresola, Liselore Vandeput I practitioners (Spring Refuges): Amina Saadi, Johanne Mortgat Shan, Noah Geistlich, Joan Somers-Donnelly, Katya Ev, Mira Verstraeten, Laura Oriol I participants (chronological order): BeeBee-lal Kamilla Arnout, Charif Bendriss, Siham Swaileim, Anne-Claire Kelam Epse Masso Mika, Salwa Achabouch, Johanna Jacobs, Mira Verstraeten, Elisabeth Ida, Ivan Azazian, Bieke De Bie, Nora Bajram, Marie Louise Ruth, Dumitru, Hilde Van Geel, … Sandrien Bilterest, Joke Flo, Tomas Tytgat, Vassilios Vassileris, Soro, Michel, Miguel, Chehri, Carine De Backer, Soph, Veronica Juliana Schmalz, Giulieta Cortez