Multiplicity of Asia Minor
Multi-species durational performance, 2022
Centrale Fies, Trento, IT
Open Spaces Festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin, DE
Multiplicity of Asia Minor (MAM) is a political speech delivered in a speculative near future where a deterritorialized, indefinable and unpredictable multi-species community enjoys autonomy in Asia Minor. The performance borrows its durational format from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 36-hour-long “Great Speech” which still serves as the foundation of Turkey’s historiography—a performative text which does not reflect reality but constructs it. Warping this “founding father gesture” into a cooperative, hospitable and self-effacing “surrogate (MAMMY) narrates, fabulates and contaminates regional mythologies in a polyphonic, pluralistic and heterogeneous manner, in the company of mythical animals historically implicated in masculinist narratives of nation building. Denormativizing the human and adapting the logics of surrogacy/posthuman gestationality to the social landscape of political rhetoric, MAM aims to propose a new model for state-citizen relations which is based on hosting and nurturing without claiming authorship or authority. Renouncing the didacticism inherent to public speech acts, MAMMY welcomes audience members one by one to each experience an interactive performance shaped around intra-uterine life, where communication relies on warmth, tactility and sound.
