The first project of the group is titled “Protesting on Demand”. The main idea is to institutionalize the act of protesting, which normally is something that is very fluid and improvised (in its choreographic sense). In this collective performance the act of protesting becomes serialized, and aesthetisized through a series of actions. But the protest is also an accessible and participatory act, contextual to the city of Washington.

The protests are being staged in 4 locations in the DC area - each group will be distinguished by different colors using the subway color system. Each group involves 4 artists, and each artist will accomplish a specific task, from engaging the public to documenting the protest. The idea is that each group will create placards and slogans with the protest initiator or promoter. The protest initiator could be someone on the street or it could be feedback obtained from the webpage associated with the project (which is accessible during the performance). The initiator or promoter will receive feedback through the Internet.

Each protest will be held for 3 minutes and they could be about anything. The content of the protests will be provided by people that are walking on the street or by people remotely through the Internet – by anyone that wants to voice concern. A web page www.floatinglabcollective.org was created to collect national and international concerns and stand points that they would like to voice in one of the most important “loci” of the world; Washington DC.
The whole idea is to create a platform to voice discourse and people’s concerns from a variety of people and concerns inside the social fabric.

 

The 4 groups on the street will be linked to the gallery (the floating office) through messengers, who will be collecting the documentation hourly, in the form of video, digital photo, sound recording and the log of the project. This “floating office” will be composed of 4 artists. The “floating office” will have a printer, computers to edit, and they will continually be updating the web page.
The documentation will continually be posted and displayed in the gallery, with video projectors and prints. The work will be constantly shifting and evolving during the execution of the performance, to amplify the idea of urgency, immediacy and overall importance.

Protesting, as a verb, means “publicly demonstrate strong objection to a policy or course of action adopted by those in authority”.  The relations are natural; the protester performs in the public space in order to convey an idea or to voice a message or to deliver a discourse. The collective amplifies this expression in order to create a platform for that voice to be present and heard. Protesting is an act of resistance to the power figures, an expression of our own identity. And these are some of the parameters of the art process.

But also protest can be seen as an act of simulacra, in a sense of performance that releases us from the “status quo,” from the reality as presented, and allows us to construct a fundamental and most basic ideal of subversion and self- determination.

Protesting has the structure of the carnival, as Bakhtin understands carnival; the collective is organized, and during the duration of the performance, the hierarchy is erased, the mask

allows the hierarchical structure to be dismantled, the figure of power and the powerless intermingle as equal. The idea of the mask is amplified by the use by one of the performer in each group of a mask, fabricated by Maureen Tucker, the masks are a stereotype of the a political monument, a synthesis of political dominance.

(The basis for this is) in the tradition of performance, particularly in relation to the ideas of Fluxus, where artists like to see what happens when different media intersect, mix things up, yet at the same time the message is simple and fun.
The performances are contextualized by the chosen location. But more important they are created in relation to self-established instructions to a system of rules that pursue the creation of an “ethos” (interrelationships between the individual and the social milieu), that creates an open signifier for the audience.

The contextual aspect of this piece is a continuation of my previous work, which means that the work deals with the specificity of the location, with elements that define that specific space. (But, this project’s relationship with performance is somehow a new experience.) In this regard, I understand DC as a big stage, full of potentiality for performers. Also the symbolic aspect of the city as the representation of a monolithic power on the planet is something that relates with my ideas of power and resistance, inclusion and exclusion.