Idea/Process

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[This text was originally published as part of the free book F A N Z I N E L E V E L 2 0 / 2 1.]




No one really knows how it works. Is there an idea? In the grant applications you of course must at least pretend there’s an idea. An idea that will be developed throughout the course of a process. What actually happens throughout the course of this process? Things are attempted, some are accepted, others rejected. The criteria for such acceptance or rejection appears to be ever-shifting. Criteria as some sort of feeling. A difficult to pin down feeling. Almost like a pain. I feel this thing should be part of the idea we are working on, while I feel this other thing perhaps should not. Or is it the other way round? The more things that become part of it, the less newer things seem to fit. At the beginning, when there is nothing, almost anything might fit. While near the end, when there are many things, almost nothing will. It is not a puzzle, because the various pieces haven’t been cut into shapes, and therefore there is no pre-decided way they may or may not fit together. The pieces will never, in fact, really fit together. That is the works charm. Also that it is charmless. And that we made it. We made it together and only we know how. And we don’t even know how. We can go back to the grant application and look at the original idea and wonder how we got from there to here. The audience cannot see the process but we want the audience to see the process. At least some shadow or taste or hint of it. The decisions and ever-shifting criteria and internal disagreements that brought us all the way to this fragile point. The point at which our process meets its end in the form of potential judgement. The point when our friends from the audience perhaps don’t quite know what to say. Would it all be better if we had started from a better idea?



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