Which emotions should we trust to be our guides? The festival We Are All Emotional announces its complete program and details.The two-day event will present ten contemporary performance art pieces that explore various facets of emotions, empathy, and solidarity within the wider social and political context of today. The festival will take place on May 6–7, 2022, at Divadlo X10 in Prague. 

 

Among the participating artists is Austrian dancer and choreographer Doris Uhlich, Cuban performance artist and dissident Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the Prague-based Laundry Collective, which deals with topics related to social exclusion, and Polish artist Zorka Wollny, who operates at the intersection of theater, activism, and contemporary music. The festival is organized by tranzit.cz / Matter of Art in collaboration with Divadlo X10, and it is co-curated by members of the tranzit.org network. Over the course of the two evenings, visitors will be invited to explore the different spaces and rooms in the theater where various performative situations will take place. A book of interviews with the artists conducted by the festival curators during the first wave of COVID-19 will be published on the occasion of the festival. The event marks the twentieth anniversary of tranzit.org.

 

Emotion is an intensity that takes place between people, concepts, and objects. Both cognitive and sensory, it moves around and sticks. As it circulates in the world, it is difficult to define. We live through events that overwhelm us emotionally. In the context of an overpowering crisis like war or climate change, it is difficult to maintain any distance. Thus, today’s political culture often seems to be driven by overpowering fears, anxieties, and anger. Are such emotions a good compass? Emotions—be they highs or lows—are coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives and which thrive on our emotional engagement. The boundaries between private and public move too fast for us to track. We react emotionally to what is happening around us, but sometimes it seems as if the ways in which we react make us incapable of dealing with the problems at hand. We shift from politics to personal and back. Have the political passions associated with twentieth-century revolutions and social strife been exhausted? Which emotions can unite us, and which emotions divide us? Which emotions should we trust to be our guides? Can we feel hopeful again? This program of activities invites artists to question the established ways of thinking about emotions and consider what gestures could create conditions for solidarity and shared empathy. Emotions are messy, contradictory, and complicated, as is art that talks about and through emotions. Yet it can guide us to understand experiences we have never had and traverse various kinds of social divides.

 Doris Uhlich 1

Tranzit.org stands in solidarity with our fellow cultural workers in Ukraine as well as everyone whose life has been disrupted and threatened by the current war, including people in Russia and Belarus protesting the war and risking persecution. We condemn Putin’s aggressive attack on Ukraine as well as all other wars. In spite of the situation, we are continuing with preparations for the festival as we strongly believe that art plays an important role in understanding complex situations and offers important yet often overlooked insights into the nature of political relations.

 

Book
A new eponymous book will be published on the occasion of the festival. The volume comprises interviews with the participating artists conducted by the festival curators during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The festival has been rescheduled twice due to the pandemic. The interviews reflect the roles that emotions play in the practices of the invited artists as well as how these artists, whose performative practices often necessitate the physical proximity of human bodies, were themselves affected by the pandemic. The book includes Czech and English versions of the interviews, and it will be available in a limited run exclusively to festivalgoers on site and free of charge.

 

Festival Venue
Divadlo X10 was founded in 2013 by current artistic director Lenka Havlíková, director in residence Ewa Zembok, and actress Anna Císařovská. From its founding until June 2018, it operated in the building of the Strašnice Theater in the Solidarity housing development in Prague. Since September 2017, the theater has operated in the spaces of the Art Industry Building (Dům uměleckého průmyslu) in downtown Prague, where it fully relocated after its voluntary departure from the Strašnice Theater in June 2018.

 

Tickets and Visitor Information
Admission to the festival is free of charge with a reservation. Single-day tickets and festival passes are available via GoOut. The performances will take place in various spaces within the building. A limited amount of seating will be available on the premises; however, it is not possible to reserve a seat. We suggest arriving early to secure a seat. The capacity of the space is limited, and online reservations must be exchanged for wristbands before 18:45 on the first day of the ticket’s validity. Based on the number of uncollected reservations, a limited number of tickets will be available at the door after 18:45. Please note that the venue is not wheelchair accessible. For assistance, please kindly reach out to the organizers via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

A bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages will be open from 18:30 to 00:00. A pop-up bookstore will be open each night from 18:30 to 22:00.

 

Trigger warning: some of the performances include content some people may find offensive or disturbing, such as nudity and intense smells or odors. Please feel free to contact the organizers if you would like to find out more about the content of each performance.

 Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara 1

Program

 

 

Friday, May 6, 2022
18:30 Doors open
19:00 Maja Štefančíková: Close Encounters
19:30 Opening Speech 
19:50 Helena Eribenne: Shadow of the Imago
20:30 Concurrently:
Zorka Wollny: Things I Don’t Tell You
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara: F5. José Maria Sicre Chess Tournament, 2017/2021
Hajnal Németh: Dream Exchanges – The Casting

 

 

Saturday, May 7, 2022
18:30 Doors open
19:00 Ovid Pop: Sunsets
19:15 Laundry Collective: Expressing the Desire for the Impossible
19:35 Larisa David: A Watched Pot Never Boils
20:05 Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová: The Second Sense
20:30 Doris Uhlich: Gootopia
21:00 Laundry Collective: Expressing the Desire for the Impossible
We Are All Emotional 
Festival of Performance Art
Divadlo X10 (Charvátova 39, 110 00, Prague, Czech Republic)
May 6–7, 2022

 

Organized by:
tranzit.cz / Matter of Art, in cooperation with Divadlo X10

 

Curated by: 
tranzit.org / Judit Angel, Dóra Hegyi, Livia Pancu, Georg Schöllhammer, 
Tereza Stejskalová, and Attila Tordai-S

 

Participating artists:
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (CU), Larisa David (RO), Helena Eribenne (AT), Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová (CZ/SK), Kolektiv Prádelna/Laundry Collective (CZ/PL), Hajnal Németh (HU), Ovid Pop (RO), Maja Štefančíková (SK), Doris Uhlich (AT), and Zorka Wollny (PL)

 

Main partner:
ERSTE Foundation

 

Media partners:
A2, Deník Alarm, ART ANTIQUES, Artalk.cz, ArtMap, Artyčok.tv, ČRo Vltava, Flash Art Czech & Slovak Edition, Kapitál
Links
tranzit.cz
cz.tranzit.org | Instagram | Facebook
 
tranzit.org
tranzit.at, tranzit.hu, tranzit.sk, tranzit.ro, tranzit.cz

 

Biennale Ve věci umění / Matter of Art
www.matterof.art | Instagram | Facebook