At the Volkskundemuseum Wien this June, in alliance with Tanzquartier Wien and La Manufacture/ HES-SO University of  applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland, (Im)mobility #3 is plotting several encounters with independent publishers, poets, writers, journalists, editors and artists whose work sits in along and with practices of dissida/ence & refusal.

(Im)mobility Salon #3 is not an event!

The program will weave together a landscape of dances and talks: fibres of poem-as-spells, translating notebooks, desires and practices that are messy and diverse, as well as joyful, occult and celebratory.

(Im)mobility Salon is imagined as an organisation of collective studies; a longing to rest in study, with many[1].

(Im)mobility Salon #3 longs to turn a choreographic inquiry into dreams of open-ended rehearsals of suspensions, of resting together. Fomenting little cracks and openings, the (Im)mobility Salon series aspires to write and dance beyond overdetermined semantic fields (and their syntax of ruination), there where the implicit summons wordings, there where it doesn’t go without saying/dancing.

Each day, 2 sessions will take place in the room-library: one Restshop in the morning at 11 am and one Invocation/conference/workshop in the afternoon at 3pm. It is open to the public, free of charge, everyday between 11 and 17.

Alongside the public sharings, a study group (the Reading Choir) composed of 10 Viennese artists and scholars will occupy the room at all time. There have been major critiques regarding the notions of ‘study’ and ‘research’ (both recast as ‘practice’, i.e. as forms of thinking and being together that never come into their own). Following groundbreaking works like The Undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013), we re-became able to conceive of ‘study’ as a set of relationships with no clear ends and with no clear names, a complicated interdependency between places, people, and resources (or lack thereof). A life form that can only take shape and endure as friendship, a shared duration, a lived endurance with one another, an understanding of our “mutual indebtedness” (instead of our being subjected to national and global debts), in the terms Randy Martin formulated in the lecture “Dance and Finance” (2013). Irit Rogoff, in turn, talks about a transformation in the notion of ‘research’ that seems to be taking place, and that is why she proposes to understand research “not as something that happens in the academy as such, but as an absolute existential necessity for the pursuit of life […], research as a matter of survival” that is not a less important one, “not a secondary form of research”. On the contrary: it is “a primary form of research”; “the figuring of where you are and what you can and can’t do; where you stand in the scheme of things – that’s research”; “a process by which we go through something together” (Rogoff, 2017).

A co-production between Volkskundemuseum, Tanzquartier Wien and Institute of Rest(s)

Institute of Rest(s) is funded by La Manufacture, Haute école des arts de la scène – HES-SO in Lausanne & supported by Tanzquartier Wien , La Grange Center /Arts et Sciences / UNIL Lausanne, Xing Bologna, le far° fabrique des arts vivants Nyon, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Volkskundemuseum Vienna and ImpulsTanz Vienna. Volkskundemuseum Vienna and ImpulsTanz Vienna.

[1] Will be present in the space: everyday, a Vienna-based study group of researchers & artists + on Mondays, the class of Artistic Strategies at the Angewandte, led by Anne Faucheret.