Greetings Sphereans! Let’s get updated. So many amazing things are in motion. This week we won’t even have time to mention CurveLabs and The Karmic Engine, Steven Bachelder and the story of the ever expanding Metagallery, The Megavote (!!) among many other things.
Enrichment Process
In November 2021, we issued a call to circus artists to participate in a web 3.0 collective experiment. Out of all the applications, 6 were selected to participate in The Sphere Metagallery. They are all participating with a production from the past, present or future to be enriched and fused with The Sphere Karmic Engine and Metagallery. Information on all selected companies can be found in the end of this newsletter.
A few weeks ago we entered a new phase of our cycle, the Enrichment Process: a series of curated workshops with experts in the field of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, media art and NFT-making to prepare the artworks for their future collective value journey.
Don’t miss tonights (Feb 9) presentation by Pedro Victor Brandão 19.00 CET!
Pedro is a Brazilian multimedia artist that has been working at the intersection of art and cryptocurrencies since 2011 in a number of projects that use social experimentation to rethink value in our times.
On this linktree (https://pedrovictor.com.br/links) there’s good documentation on what he’s been up to.
In January 2021 he created the Acerola Fund as a distributed governance and indirect coordination experiment focused on the acquisition of NFT’s created by artists from the Global South, which he’s further developing as a DAO.
The link to the presentation can be found in #general in The Sphere Discord server: LINK
The Sphere Metagallery Opening March 1st
The countdown is running! 19 days until we open the Metagallery – a portal to a new ecosystem of horizontal support.
Straight from the Discord: A fragment from last year's Anarchive Lab
“Feeling interdependence does not derive from knowledge. It is above all an act of “letting oneself be touched” and involves a form of gratitude that is neither subjective nor objective, since its truth lies in its generativity. If this feeling needs to be cultivated, it is because it is vulnerable. As humans, we know only too well that we may get dragged into ingratitude, entrenching ourselves against the feeling that we are who we are thanks to others. However derisory, interstitial, and fragile interdependence may seem, the task of the inquirer is to make it exist as part of a practical and political imagination, to be reactivated bit by bit and step by step.”
Isabelle stengers, "We are Divided"
The Artists and Companies to be presented in The Metagallery
Room 100 – C8H11NO2
Experimental performing company from Split, Croatia. Room 100 was established by Antonia Kuzmanić and Jakov Labrović in 2010.
C8H11NO2, the first show by Room 100, stunned the jury of the “Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe 2009 - 2010” platform, earning the young Croatian company an award and the highest score in the ten year long project's history. The critics praised C8H11NO2 as an “exceptional example of an intelligent, accurate, deliberate and intensive work”.
Collectif Petit Travers – Le Petit Travers
Collectif Petit Travers was founded in 2004.
Since 2011, the artistic direction has been lead by both Nicolas Mathis and Julien Clément.
The activity of Collectif Petit Travers is mainly based on the creation and the distribution of juggling full length shows and transmission of knowledge, but was also partly dedicated until 2012 to the creation of dance/performance pieces.
In 12 years, Collectif Petit Travers created six pieces, including more than 1000 presentations across the world (England, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China, Argentina, Chile, Israel, Turkey…).
Encounters and collaborations have been taking place with great names of Dance (Maguy Marin, Pina Bausch, Josef Nadj), Music (Pierre Jodlowski, Sébastien Daucé), of Circus (Jérôme Thomas), and of Theatre, showing the opening dynamic characterizing the work of the collective, a juggling from the inside in order to create the widest and most expressive language possible.
Inbal Ben Haim – PLI
At the crossroads of circus, dance and visual arts, the artist Inbal Ben Haim innovates, surprises and fascinates. She orchestrates a virtuoso, airy and poetic dialogue with paper, a material that metamorphoses, goes from fragility to resistance and acquires fascinating visual and sound properties.
Born from the meeting between the circus artist Inbal Ben Haim and the plastic artists Alexis Mérat and Domitille Martin, PLI explores new crossovers between circus and visual arts by making paper the essential and primary substance of its creative process. By becoming the support for virtuoso aerial acrobatics, the paper introduces a surreal and metaphorical dimension of our human condition. Material more than material, paper transforms, changes state, goes from fragility to resistance and acquires new functional, visual and musical properties.
EDO Cirque – L'esthétique de l'ours
EDO – l’estetica dell’orso is a circus show.
Is having a video of a bear doing backflips on a green teeterboard as starting point.
PAF
The bear is in the air. Head down. He does a salto.
He resists (despite the speed).
Everything is in disorder.
Because we are like that: between idiocy and virtuosity, between infantilism and adultism, between absurd and sublime.
(the ones do not exclude the others by the way)
Andrea Salustri – MATERIA
Andrea Salustri comes from Rome and has been working as a street artist.In 2013 he graduated cum laude in Philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome, then decided to move to Berlin to where he first completed the Dance Intensive program at Tanzfabrik Berlin, and studied dance and choreography at HZT Berlin University.
MATERIA explores the possibilities of one material, polystyrene, to the point it becomes alive and protagonist of the events on stage. The role of the performer shifts towards the one of the facilitator, and the focus is constantly negotiated between object, manipulator and manipulation.
A path leads and follows the material from the hesitating movement quality of a delicate encounter to the loud soundscape of a self-sufficient apparatus. Drifting between calmness and darkness, between discovery and destruction.
The piece tries not to force a narrative but rather let the audience project their own narrative on the images presented on stage. Within a set score, objects are free to perform and take initiatives.
Defracto – Circuits Fermés
Founded in 2008 by Guillaume Martinet, David Maillard, Minh Tam Kaplan and Laure Caillat, Defracto is conceived to host the juggling creation projects of the members of the company. The aim is to create a body and juggling language.
The company was Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe laureate in 2010 with the duo “Circuits Fermés”, created by David Maillard, Minh Tam Kaplan and Guillaume Martinet. This piece was presented more than a hundred times in more than 30 countries in Europe, Africa and South America.
Thanks for reading <3 We’ll be back soon!
/The Sphere