WORKSHOPS | STUDIES 2024

CONCEPT ‘I DON’T KNOW’

After PAS #80 in 2022 and #86 in 2023, we are continuing our fruitful collaboration with PAS-Studies (Germany) in 2024 with a theme that places the unknown at the center of our performance-based artistic research.

‘Not knowing’ is an exciting but can also be annoying state. It can make us angry, pushes us to the limits of our perception, but always keeps us curious about what might be out there. In the artistic process, the unknown is an important direction for creation, and here the art is no different from science. Artistic research invites us to experiment and try things out, it places our acquired knowledge in a different context and dialogue. We may fail right at the start, but the will to find out something is an important step into the unknown.

If we accept this fact and focus our attention on the unknown, we will discover possibilities during the research process that may change our perception and the way we create. By letting go of the known and controlled self-perception, we gain new tools to formulate something we were not aware of before. It requires an openness to include our own practice in a critical exchange in order to steer our thoughts in a different direction.

The theme ‘I Don’t Know’ is also linked to a look at our troubled times. Many aspects of global change need attention and solutions. We often feel overwhelmed by the mass of challenges flooding our lives and feel powerless to respond. Perhaps we don’t know how? Perhaps we sense something and are unable to articulate it? Maybe we just don’t know how to participate in these big discussions?

By combining both directions of the topic, we want to create statement-based artworks in which we try to address issues of tomorrow by turning them into performance artworks.