UNKNOWN GROUNDS
Unknown Grounds is a performative symposium and interdisciplinary co-educational platform for the building of the public. By borrowing tools from performance art and through workshops guided by curated guests we will encourage different modes of playful participation and critical inquiry. Immersed in a theatrical atmosphere, we will become 'personas' where reality and fiction mingle, out of the conviction that hands on and speculative labor are both crucial to building the public towards something different than what it is today.
We asked ourselves: What labor are we performing in the public building? What sorts of labor are yet to be imagined?
Who will be the actors of future social transformations and how will their identity influence the nature of these transformations?
Is a performer someone ready to embody the challenge of making things happen?
We are convinced that this must be a collective effort.
A performative-symposium is a platform where intellectual and speculative inquiry intersects with performance arts. There are no lectures to just sit and listen to: an emergent community is invited to experiment with embodied and experiential ways of researching and sharing knowledge.
Unknown Grounds is a transdisciplinary space where we become performers in a collective play without stage or audience, where we experiment with the plasticity of the self, towards becoming other than what we are as individuals. Learning is meant to be a transformative experience.
Unknown Grounds II: The Public Building focuses on how our public domains are constituted and enacted and wonders how it can be built otherwise.
Contributors of second edition: Nishant Shah, Hamja Ahsan, Lila Athanasiadou, Ribal El-Khatib, Nina Glockner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Eef Veldkamp and Anna Moreno.
Contributors of first edition: Andrej Radman, Sissel Marie Tonn, Ribal, Theun Karelse, Masha Ru, Bert Looper and Flora Reznik.
Video documentation of Unknown Grounds, the public building, 2022
Video documentation of Unknown Grounds 2019
Videography: Niels Kooistra
Unknown Grounds, was initiated by Flora Reznik and co-curated together with Eef Veldkamp.
It is a production by Kunstinitiatief VHDG, in collaboration with Stadsschowburg de Harmonie and Arcadia, and is supported by Provincie Fryslan, Pictoright Fonds, Stichting Herbert Duintje Fonds, Pauwhof Fonds, Het Nieuwe Stadsweeshuis, Ritske Boelema Gasthuis and LF2028.