dramaturgical posture

I build questions around language, body, text, migration and otherness as I would build architectural mazes and unfinished structures, or a scaffolding, around an edifice that might be or might not be there. Scaffolding is a personal choice of dramaturgy that fits this artistic research because of its seemingly temporary and unstable posture that supports and is supported at the same time.

A personal anecdote (of course) gesturing toward scaffolding as a dramaturgical posture:

When I was in my 20s and lived at the intersection of Utah and 25th Streets in the Mission district of San Francisco, the owner of the three-storied Victorian house that I rented from decided to paint the building. A three-storied scaffolding was put around our house. Each story of the structure had several wooden platforms enveloped by the drapes of the dark green tarp. I could open the window of my room to step out on the platform that became a temporary balcony. At some point the paint job was stalled due to some unforeseen construction regulations and the scaffolding was left untouched for several months. Gradually, my friends and I turned the scaffolding into a gathering place, having drinks and snacks, and one friend even camped there in a sleeping bag for several nights. One windy San Francisco evening the scaffolding structure collapsed and dented a car parked by our house. No human was hurt but such a wonderful gathering site was gone. A few times during the initial process of thinking about our thesis, we, MA students, were offered a metaphor of inviting certain philosophers and critical theory thinkers to our dinner table as a theoretical starting point for our conceptual part. Well, dinner tables are not my typical communing sites, therefore I would like to invite some thinkers to the scaffolding structure.

Scaffolding becomes a dramaturgical posture, the structure that is, perhaps, there to hold something in the first place, but also the structure in its own right. The instability of the structure and its uncertain temporality invites unusual encounters. The scaffolding of my artistic research holds seagulls, loss, philosophers, other artists, ghosts, institutions, languages, affects, traumas, mythological legal documents such as Russian Federation Constitution and much more. Specifically driven by the ongoing economic and institutional instability, the scaffolding becomes the only possible place of these eclectic and risky encounters. Then, the scaffolding structure functions similar to the Randy Martin’s idea of a collective risk taking endeavor (well, kinda).

Will the scaffolding be removed to uncover a remodeled structure, an innovation, an aesthetic object (an art object??!)? Will it collapse and destroy surrounding objects as its casualties? Will it become an inhabited livable space that will cease to be only the holding structure but will become the "original"? Is the scaffolding a monstrous structure that is sucking the life out of the original structure that it envelopes - later discovered as a dried out body by the archaeologists of the future?

There is a scaffolding concept in the psychology of education developed by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, where the adult, or a more knowledgable peer, offers a temporary holding structure of knowledge or skills to a child or a beginner. A temporary container, that gets removed eventually, helps the learner with development of more complex skills that they would not achieve on their own. I imagine that similar to Vygotsky’s scaffolding concept, there is a chance that there is a marvelous growing edifice, a coherent concept under construction, but also I speculate that there nothing that is emerging underneath and the space under the scaffolding is actually empty. This dramaturgical posture gestures to multiple speculative or fictioning directions that I would like to explore in my artistic work.