My name is Eduardo Abrantes, I am an artistic researcher with a hybrid practice, sometimes I use the name pairsofthree when working mostly with and within sound. This text, however, is not about me as myself but about the early stages of development of the circumstantial entity known as The Here And Now.
The Here And Now was born under the influence of my own expectations and someone else’s voice – this happened in the very place where these expectations are to come to fruition, The Sisters Academy sensuous learning and cohabitation experiment, manifesting itself in Malmö in little more than a week.
Having in my own personal life used throughout most of my formative years a psychic construct akin to a poetic self, in order to secure my own independence of will and agency under a constant state of psychological aggression, I find myself unwilling to go back to this strategy unquestioningly. A poetic self, though a beautiful thing, can become quite easily a cage of one’s own making. Kafka wrote somewhere in a fragment which has stayed with me, “a cage went in search of a bird” – I am not this cage, nor am I the bird.
The Here And Now is not a poetic self if a poetic self is an expansion of one’s embodied aesthetical projected identity, having oneself as the center for this expansion. The Here And Now might be a poetic self if a poetic self is an expansion of one’s possibilities of engagement with others in an expanded field of aesthetic and ethical participation, which remains centreless yet situated in a multiplicity of bodies. The Here And Now is meant as an exercise in not-self-centeredness, an exercise in minimal and intimate community making. Since The Here And Now is a human project, it will most likely both fail and succeed, alternatively and maybe even simultaneously, still these are the guidelines to be pursued, stumbled over, and maybe forgotten and left behind.
What is The Here And Now about? The Here And Now is not about appearance, because he is too lazy to dress up and too eager for contact and mutual permeability to spend much attention on surface design. The Here And Now respects the attention and care given to surface design, but The Here And Now does not place emphasis on its own surface design. The Here And Now carves more often that it embroiders.
The Here And Now uses the tools and strategies of situated awareness in the context of cohabitation, shedding care for recalled past and projected future in order to find a more even grounding in a tighter sense of present. It is from this point in temporarily that The Here And Now pursues its calling, bring conflict in its multiplicity and highly layered dimensions into focus and operate with it, instigating, diffusing, making it both translucid and something one can in full awareness, leave behind.
The Here And Now is drawn to the kind of chaos that comes from discipline gone wrong, from needs not met nor voiced, from negative feelings instigating aggressive agency. These, The Here And Now views as profoundly revealing, authentic and promising territories for the collective celebration and euphoric calmness that is manifest after emotional storms.
Sources of inspiration to be drawn from and experimented with by The Here And Now:
- Vitus dance/choreomania
- Everyday life and ritual territories in large scale prison systems (ex. Carandiru, Rikers Island, La Sabaneta)
- Passive-aggressiveness, paranoia, and “civilized” interpersonal tools of conflict
- Transcendental meditation
- Adrenalin, endorphin and serotonin
- Plant life and Ego-dissolution techniques
- Fists, tongue, teeth, nails and acoustic penetration
- Transformative potential of everyday objects
- Radical interdependency
- Coded communication, shame and relief
- Non-hierarchical systems of community self-regulation