Festival

Letting Festival Into The Festival

A new era should begin with a bang or perhaps the bang is when something comes to an end. In troubled times bangs aren’t what we look forward to but what is needed is to come together and stay together, to practice forms of solidarity and enjoy being with rather than look at.

Festival has a long history but it’s only recently that it has been synonymous with spectacle and a clear division between expression and audience, producer and receiver. For hundreds of years festivals weren’t first and foremost about showing something but about being and doing together. It wasn’t about celebrating certain individuals, like famous actors or pop stars. What was supposed to be successful was the festival, being together and equal. During festivals, this was central, everybody was equal, hierarchies were erased, status, family and belonging were hidden behind masks. The time of festivals was a moment of anarchy, a time without organization, when everything was possible and value out of place.

Ob/scene is a festival in the form of a modern-day festival but this year it attempts to cultivate something of the old spirit of coming together.

Theatre proposes certain ways of looking and experiencing. We look at theatre and consume spectacle with our eyes not so unlike how we humans have been taught how to look at, experience and consume the earth. The theatre teaches us that it’s okay to consume and take advantage of the earth. To take without considering the consequences, to extract without giving back. Can performing arts question and propose alternative strategies that instead emphasize care, being with, intimacy and entanglement?

This year’s Ob/scene Festival has decided on a smaller format, one venue and an informal setting in order to strengthen the social and engaging qualities of the festival. Is it maybe urgent today to come together and share instead of remaining anonymous spectators or closing out the world in favor of screen time and anonymity? Therefore the festival will happen all hours of the day and night, remixing performances with culinary experiences, DJ-sets, shared practices, walks and publications.

The artists, people, works, get-togethers, workshops and hangouts that Ob/scene brings to Seoul this time is our shared contribution to a different world.

Programs

Event

『OB.SCENE No.10』 Book Launch
Forum
- 11.19.Thu 20:30
- Acade Seoul
- Free
- Korean, English
The tenth edition of Ob.Scene magazine takes as its starting point the possibility of experiences and sensations that bypass, circumvent, corrupt or otherwise intercept subjectivity, or personhood. Can we imagine or must such experiences be forms of accidents or negatives that show up rather than being wilfully constructed?

It is through the subject that a person mediates impressions and offers us to navigate the world, actual, phenomenal and imaginary. Simultaneously the subject is nothing natural but constructed through processes of governmentality and power dynamics, and those engagements are never innocent but correlated to labor, family constellations, gender, race etc. The possibility of experiences without mediation carries the agency of rendering politics of the subject obsolete, thus necessitating the formation of other modes of subject formation.

Art and in particular aesthetic encounter are one of very few domains of human experience that harbors the power of the emergence of those forms of sensations, sensations that are violent because they disrupt the comfortable flow of entangled life and at the same time blissful because the interval created is another name for freedom.

Guest edited by Mårten Spångberg the volume presents a remix of theoretical inquiries, artists’ writing and a catalog of artists who in their work, in different ways, address the regulatory and human-centric formation of personhood.

Come and get your copy of the publication next to a conversation between the editor and some of the contributors.

Ob.Scene magazine was founded in 2011 by Hyun-Suk Seo and Seonghee Kim, as an experimental proposal through which the format magazine became a conceptual carrier. Magazine thus as a space of potentiality that can appropriate and function as an exhibition space, stage, kitchen and equally turn theatre into a publication, a dance something taking place on paper or some form of hybrid without destination. Perhaps, even a magazine that is an exhibition or a performance that looks like a dance but is a publication. In other words, magazines in the expanded field, and an opportunity to engage with the properly unsettling.