God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care

The title of God exists, the mother is present, but they no longer care by Impure Company/Hooman Sharifi was found in Roland Barthes’ book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. In addition Sharifi integrated texts from Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and fragments from the writing of Nietzsche.

In this material Sharifi found inspiration to his the production. The correlation between text and movement and in particular the act of reading was examined in a series of variations and situations. For the spectator the use of words can lead to a more precisely perceived meaning than what is generated with movement alone.

The Slovenian philosopher and contemporary art theorethican Bojana Kunst writes the following about God exists, the mother is present, but they no longer care:

"The belonging is a privilege in the contemporary world. It is small piece of peace guarded by continuous state of war, a tiny piece of land acquainted by an excessive spending, a small amount of love, given by a continuous fear of loss. But it is possible to belong only if someone can afford to belong. Numerous people can't belong, they are not even entitled as people to whom one can belong, people who are not admitted to the language and don't have the tears for love, who are waiting in a desolate silence, for an immigrant ship which would never leave. We are paradoxically inhabiting the social space where there is less and less possibility to belong to the world. In the space of no belonging, the only possible form of protest is a protest without any meaning. The status of contemporary violence is namely deeply changed, it is not the consequence of a recognizable subjective force, but a kind of, as Slavoj Žižek said, objective, anonymous violence, a systemic violence which is automatically excluding the people and destroying the vast territories of land and life. The fascinating subjective violence of social agents, evil individuals or fanatic masses is only a spectacular peak of the pyramid of violence which has its firm base in the objective, systemic force of capital directly defining the activity of social reality. In this sense the gesture of violence in God exists, the mother is present, but they no longer care, has no goal in the sense that it would like to touch us with the representation of the irrational subjective force (as many contemporary depictions of violence would do). At the same time the gesture here doesn't evoke memories, it is not an aesthetic monument of terrible effects of violence. It is rather developed as an endurance of pure means, an endurance of moving body being reduced from belonging, language and love, an endurance of the body which is continuously forced not to come out from its own shadow. Dancing in the performance is developed with the particular gestural language, which is disclosing an important ethos of the gesture in the contemporary world. This is an ethos of a gesture, which opens the body to the possibilities of its non-belonging. An important gesture in the world where impossibility of belonging is not only a social consequence of contemporary 'way of life', but more and more a terrible fact of 'nature': a consequence of systemic, anonymous production of violence which due to its vertiginous profits is absolutely ignorant on its effects on reality."

God exists, the mother is present, but they no longer care by Impure Company/Hooman Sharifi was supported by Arts Council Norway and the Norwegian Ministry for Foreign Affairs/MFA (travelling grant for performing arts).

Sources:

BIT Teatergarasjen, bit-teatergarasjen.no, Spring 2008, 07.08.2010, http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no -arkiv

Spring program 2009, Avant Garden.