The Arpentage is a method for reading political literature together and for the self-empowerment of emancipatory movements. People met in small groups to study literature and discuss possibilities for action.

The Arpentage project translates this principle into today’s world and into the context of theater and performance. People who are politically engaged in their work are invited to each Arpentage. The journey begins with the Critical Teachers Collective (18/12/23), followed by an arpentage with members of the theater collective cie La Mêlée (15/12/23). Next, we work with members of the Network of Young Journalists on (04/12/24), then join forces with Critical Social Workers (10/12/24), before concluding with activists from the Fashion Revolution Movement (14/12/24).

In the context of the independent theater scene, the performance “elle a élevé la voix au-dessus de la mêlée” questions the political promise of inclusion and diversity as concepts that create reality. It uses the approach of the deconstruction of power relations in order to take apart these premises. Inclusion and diversity need stable identities and without demarcation and fierce power relations there is no stabilization of identities.

The process-based performance “Elle a élevé la voix au-dessus de la mêlée”:

• is an immersive art format for a hybrid scene.
• uses the rehearsal and performance apparatus of the theater without a classical directorial function, but with co-authorship of all participants: from theater technician to house dramaturge and cleaners to artistic direction, to artists of the independent scene: from acting to media art, spoken word, dance, and dramaturgy.
• makes use of the rehearsal and performance setting of theater without a script.
• uses the rehearsal and performance system of the theater with actors who are only partially involved in the acting profession.
• uses the theater’s rehearsal and performance system in a tight time frame.

This results in five evenings in which the focus is on the emotional — physical — dimension of power and its effects. The performers, all active in the independent theater scene but in various power relationships with one another, are encouraged to act at eye level. In these five evenings, the audience experiences multiple narratives set next to each other in a non-hierarchical manner, which have been developed during a two-week rehearsal process. Regardless of how constructive or destructive, these narratives are for a hybrid independent scene.

“Elle a élevé la voix au-dessus de la mêlée” questioned the validity of the concept of inclusion and proposed to work instead with Donna Haraway’s kinship concept between humans and non-humans. The pigeons present in the dispositive of “elle a élevé la voix au-dessus de la mêlée” — as the only non-human living beings — remained however as the “authentic stage design” of human affairs.

The three-weeks research “Now I’d rather go snorkeling with you” deepens this idea of kinship and examines our relationship with aliveness within and outside of us humans. What options do we have to touch and be touched by other beings?

To explore this question, we descend into the cold Lake Zurich with snorkels, goggles, wetsuits, headlamps, hydrophones, and underwater jukeboxes to linger. We combine our snorkeling experience with the method of Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros, reflect on it and thus bring it into a narrative form.

“Conspiracy Means to Breathe Together” will be a site-specific sound performance in an indoor swimming pool. This project arises from the need to establish the earth’s atmosphere as a political space. We are all connected to this political space through our individual breathing. Etymologically, conspiracy means “con spirare”, to breathe together. “Conspiracy Means To Breathe Together” connects thus a political meeting in the sense of a clandestine arrangement for the creation of a social rearrangement with something as banal and at the same time as fundamental as breathing.