(At)Tend : reflections on The Garden at the Swedish Performing Arts Biennale by matt lambert

Attend: To Be Present
Tend: To apply oneself to the care of/ watch over
Tender: (adj) demanding careful and sensitive handling
(verb) To present for acceptance

Attend:
Karlsgatan 2 is a building and an architectural arcade. The public entrance is two sets of doors running through the center, offering the public a covered walkway cutting through a city block. Sitting in the museum café you can see people on their phone dashing to an errand, ducking in with a baby stroller to avoid the rain, many do not even turn their heads realizing the divide they are treading on.

When entering Karlsgatan 2, depending on which entrance used, if you turn your head one direction you will find the Västmanland County Museum. The space offers a child friendly historical overview of the surrounding geography and historical happenings of Västerås and Sweden at large, with costumes and props and interactive touch environments. When turning your head to the opposite end you will find Västerås Konstmuseum, a traditional art venue containing permanent and rotating historical and contemporary art exhibitions hung mostly salon style. When entering the building you find yourself on a threshold. You can choose between institutions, a café, a museum shop, or to simply pass through the building. All of which offer you something different, a movement to somewhere.

Tend:
The Garden is choreographed by Nichole Canuso and performed by Nichole Canuso, Oliver Mahar, Maria Naidu, Kyrie Oda, and Tobias Sköld. It is a site-specific performance that allows for four participants at a time to blur the line of performer, participant, and audience through four different selections of pre-recorded and synchronized audio available on personal headphones in both English and Swedish.

Participants are guided to interact with the building and performers moving between rooms and levels. At times I was asked to consider my body in relation to the building, to watch others, and to ponder their lives and my connections with them looking through the windows onto a cement plaza. At other times I was instructed to sit and observe the performers as they interacted with the space and with each other. These movements—of my own body, other participants and performers—began to stitch together the steel skeleton of the building. Dwelling in the thresholds and liminal spaces of the building a consciousness is summoned of the human and of the place.

Tender:
The Garden presents for participants acceptance a history of the building. Sitting in the archive room I am directed by the audio prompt to look at the bookshelves. I am asked to consider who and what is in them, noting the oldest and newest book to be found in the collection and the vast stacks present on this timeline between them. Stories of the steel used to construct the building are told, tracing the lines of the building. In a gathering space next to the Konstmuseum I am asked to follow and retrace the steps of the performer. In a chair in the café on the main floor I am asked to trace the lines in my palm, contemplating their origins, my origins. Looking up to see a performer sitting across the café at another table, I am asked to trace and replicate their movements. Tracing, following, and connecting are the strategy. I am too focused when wearing the headphones to realize how I too am performing. As an unaware spectator watching this scene unfold there is just the faintest of sound for performers to keep in time matching the headphones, so faint you have to focus and know it is there to hear it. To those who are unaware of what is going on participant and performer are indistinguishable.

Singular Plural

Presence is impossible except as copresence – Jean-Luc Nancy

In the summer of 1995 Jean-Luc Nancy wrote Being Singular Plural. Singular here does not have the implication of individual ownership. The I is not prior to the we. It is a proposal for abandonment, for exposure to each other, to build community without spectacle or searching for authenticity. Using the stage as an image Nancy states:

It is a stage in the sense of the opening of a space-time for the distribution of singularities, each of whom singularly plays the unique and plural role of the “self” or the “being-self.” “Self” does not mean in itself, or by itself, or for itself, but rather “one of us”: one that is each time at a remove from immanence or from the collective, but is also each time coessential to the coexistence of each one, of “each and every one.” The stage is the space of a co-appearing without which there would be nothing but Being pure and simple, which is to say, all and nothing, all as nothing.

The Garden as a performance, as a stage, offers a space to highlight our interconnectedness. The inescapable connections to people, places, and processes. It moves participant’s bodies, weaving and entangling them with the building, performers, and the place we are gathered on, and its past, present, and future. It offers a moment to ground us in these possible places and leaves us with lingering thoughts.

With The Garden—just as Jean-Luc Nancy admits with Being Singular Plural—there is a risk of a “Christian, idealist and humanist tone” a promoting of virtues and “values that have loosed upon the world all the things that have driven humanity of our century to despair over itself, where those values are both blind to and complicit in this letting loose.” But just as Nancy is aware of this, so too is choreographer Nichole Canuso. Sitting down with Nichole at the end of the day we talked about the challenges of adapting a performance to a foreign place, what it means to rely on others to unpick toxic intimacies with the land, and the colonial mesh that blankets almost everything. It is a necessary awareness and a willingness to be nimble and to adapt and change as knowledge is gained from the margins. It is working towards turning the micromanaged, manicured royal English Rose Garden back into an indigenous wild field as it once was.

The Garden is not tied to perfect repetition but is instead designed to breathe and adapt. It is open, quite literally and poetically, to translation. It also requires a vulnerable openness with participants so that they will trust where they are being led. For me, this is where The Garden vibrates. The performance takes a risk while asking for reciprocation, it performs or enacts ourtenuous human connections\. It does not just illustrate or dictate on a superficial level but creates an example, an immersion into a possibility of being with.

Bibliography
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working towards equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling object making, writing, curating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD candidate in craft at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts & Design in Stockholm, Sweden. They have published, curated, and exhibited internationally, and their work is collected across the globe.