INSANE

Protocol

With already forty scenarios, collectif Random imagines and orchestrates tales for the spaces with which it associates. These scenarios vary each time depending on the time frames, teams and budgets, which are always different.
The following Protocol describes an “ideal” Situation(s). It can be adjusted and compacted according to the host’s realities.
Each step below has been imagined for time frames that can vary in length. The impregnation in the space is stronger the longer a Situation(s) is deployed in time.

Step 0 – Before /
Meeting the host team, observing the space, visiting places for the first time, drafting a pre-project.

Step 1 – Infiltration /
Meeting the local organisations that could potentially become partners. Beginning an infiltration in the neighbourhood, visiting and drifting, making chance encounters, starting to gather stories and atmospheres on the field. Finalising the writing of the scenario.

Step 2 – Creative Residencies /
Establishing partnering actions, initiating actions in the field. Continuing the process of meeting the users of the place and conducting interviews.

At this stage and depending on the devised scenario, the team starts to create sound, graphic design, performative or audio-visual pieces… in connection with the place, the encounters, the people. These compositions serve to launch the scenario and to build the final form.

Step 3 – Ritual and Highlights /
Artistic forms are revealed and brought to life during one or several moments.

Step 4 – After /
The departure is examined at the same time as the arrival when the scenario is created. It is a fully fledged act, a part of the overall story.

MANIFESTO

This manifesto sets out the essential principles needed to carry out any Situation(s):

• The artist’s freedom to say and do

Situation(s) is a contextual artistic act; spaces greet it in the spirit of a carte blanche and not as a commission. The protocol is perfectly suited to places where art is rarely expected, or in spaces where urban transformation creates natural frictions with living beings. While the collective’s first and only vocation is artistic creation, we have been led to observe that positive externalities derive from our mere presence, starting with “the activation of resident dynamics” and “a contribution to each one’s power to act”.

These observations have led us to become aware of the political and social stakes of our presence in this space. Before each Situation(s), we therefore indicate that we are not anyone’s instrument if we aren’t everyone’s, and we mention this again during our presence in the field if necessary. We maintain our freedom to say, think and act while also guaranteeing empathy and transparency at all times.

• A docu-fiction poetic act

Listening to the places and greeting each one’s narrative. Points of view can then be led to converge and to brush with the singular sensitivity of the artists of the collective. What will be uttered will, in fine, be what will have passed the test of poetics.

• A practice that is, above all, immersive

Living in the neighbourhood, seeing it, walking in it at all hours and under every angle.

Members of the collective are housed on the premises in the neighbourhood in which they work, where they come with their families.

• An experiential practice in which no one is a spectator, but rather a witness or an actor of ritual-poetic acts.

• Re-engaging with the question of the ritual. We believe that art can be envisioned as a new form of social ritual in urban and human contexts that are undergoing transformation.

• A relational aesthetic in which form is borne out of formal artistic endeavours as much as it is borne out of the relationship created between the work of art and the one who attends – contributes.

• Telling ourselves – being heard

Creating the tale together to question and reinvent the place, its history, its uniqueness, its value. Triggering the tale of a place, orchestrating the catharsis.

• Inducing a side step, asking for the impossible, softly allowing everyone to leave their comfort zone.

• Generating moments to meet, exchange, debate, collect, conceive with the town’s partnering structures while also maintaining a regular presence in the public space through the RANDOMobile.

… with established groups (local associations, schools, retirement homes, sports clubs…) who breathe life to the place, occupy it, mould it…

… with those who think, build, decide (urban planners, elected officials, workers, architects). Depth and richness are therefore added to the content and create friction between words. Concurrences between plural ideas emerge, mirroring the different layers that make the place alive.

Also setting aside time for individual chance encounters through the practice of drifting, of going door to door, of meeting at bar counters, at windows, on a bench… for people who do not enter local structures to come aboard.

• Playing with vocables. Learning to speak the language of each one (resident, politician, urban planner, dealer…) in order to devise with everyone, to take each and everyone on board, to find the story’s shattered and polymorphic language in each trodden space.

• The RANDOMobile

It is present during the key moments that punctuate the venue’s daily life (the market, a cultural or sporting event, the town’s festive fair…). It consists in a place of discussion, of gathering, just as it is a convivial place of welcome.

• A connecting agent is present for the proper follow-up of these long-course adventures

• Practising negotiations with the apparent and the invisible to induce movement in a fragmented space, and to find the right place for a common tale to form. Working on the notion of contour, of delimitation and of edges. Experimenting with the plasticity of a place and its ability to greet the unexpected.

• Enhancing what exists from a human, material and organic perspective. Relying on the skills and knowledge inherent to these places, but also on the materials that compose the space in view of creating installations or set designs.

• The natural and progressive appearance of the artwork or of the scenario in the venue, respecting the place’s rhythm and its occupants.