Kant says in his work about imagination, and Heidegger repeats, that 'the power of imagination represents not only one faculty among others, but is rather their mediating center', so it is a glue, something without which all of that could not stand together: memory, body, voice, perception, ideas, dreams.
Kant discards Descartes’ view that the way we perceive and what is outhere when we don’t perceive, because of the mediation of a God, because it is a very lousy explanation in the end. He first thought maybe there is an evil spirit that makes us think there is this and this in this reality, but then he somehow understood that God wants us to perceive this as a reality, and as God is good we should believe he wants us to see things as they are............
So these two other guys say that reality is there even when we dont see it, not because there is God or anything like that, but more because of the power of imagination to 'see' even things that are not there present to us.
Kant says that our impressions are not just floating in the air and connected by accident by the imagination, but that all that is much more active: there must be something outside of us, that according or because of us is as it is, and that the way we perceive it and out it together is also active
It is similar to what we do to ourselves by doing our practice, and what we want (or what I want) the audience to do: willing suspension of disbelief. We don’t want noone to be carried away, although that is fine too. But we want all of us, us and the audience to get involved in actively creating this something, this world that does not exist otherwise. I think this is a progress (or maybe a move, because progress is a very misused word) from last year or from 2008, when I thought that it anyway exists and that we just embody it and put it visible and audible. Now, I think we do create it ourselves, of course it exists somewhere before existing in the form of stories we create, it is a story that is stored in us. But our position is not just to sit and be at disposal (although this is where it starts) but rather to engage with, to develop, to create the time and the space we enhabit.
there is a 3,5 year old eusebio (gugi) here with us, he constantly watches us doing our thing, then when the room is empty he starts moving in all four, and singing himself. i wish that we could paste the video of him here. yesterday he even had a duo with tehvan, it was amazing how free and simple he was in what he was doing. i wander if in 30 years maybe he has an interview in a magazine and he says something like 'there was this couple from slovenia that stayed with us when i was 4 and i was watching them moving and voicing all day long and this work imprinted in me strong desire to do something like them'
it is indeed a big compliment for what we do, when i see him doing this so engaged.
i also wander what kind of art and performance will exist in 50 years from now. probably as marina abramovic (my least favorite person) says in one of her books 'less and less mediated. we are now working towards having only an audience and an artist, and nothing inbetween. just energy.' she might be overdoing things, but with this probably she is right.
Torvald Silver, 14-07-2011 Laboratorio dell' Imperfetto, Gambettola