Patsy Lassbo – fugue

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  • This work has extreme light and strobe effects, loud music and smoke. If you are photosensitive, please take this into account. 
  • Wheelchair accessible. 

 

From Latin: fuga, related to both fugere ("to flee") and fugare ("to chase”)

  1. Music: a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
  2. Psychiatry: A dissociative fugue is a temporary state in which a person has memory loss and ends up in an unexpected place. People that show this symptom cannot remember who they are or details about their past.

fugue is a drama between self, body and world; a play for voids; a cave rave; a heretical consciousness; a fractal movement; a virginal space; a sludge situation; an attention reassignment surgery; a poetics of liminality; a bad analogy; a sideways time; a kenophile dwelling; a sentient siege; a bewildered wandering.

"Take over space. Take over machines. Take over chemistry. Play from inside the signs, the tech, the real estate. At least for a bit. There’s no outside anymore, but maybe we can find some fractal world on the inside." – McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)


Fullness
by Juli Reinartz


There is a certain pleasure when something is full, so full that the focus gets lost and concentration is somewhere in between. I feel some sort of bliss when I find myself being busy with so much that I barely sense one thing in particular, but instead think about how they sense or touch each other. Being on the verge of things or in between all of them. Fullness devaluing the idea of a thing, liminality by way of fullness. I consider fullness a way to have the apparatuses that you are busy with blabber to you, to give up the idea to have control over them, to release them into wild relation - particularly their too silent and too regular parts. Having them shine through the things they radiate towards. You have to put yourself on the receiving end of their relations though. A feedback loop through your ass. The maker is the listener, or rather the hearing aid. Not exactly out in the open but also not really invisible, all in beige, hiding in plain sight just in order to feel something that is already there. Their presence is bringing something into being that otherwise might just stay vague. This is quite literally the presence of the hearing aid. The maker as a prothesis (Lassbo). The question is just: what does it take to be with what is already there? How willing are you to turn the hearing aid on at all? Fullness seems to be suggesting that it should take the same to be with an aesthetic situation as it takes to be with the world. Theater constructed as a dare. A constructed dare wondering if you can take it. Or what would you be willing do to make it stop? Secondly and maybe most importantly, aesthetic fullness is also a question, a question that hasn’t stopped unfolding its deadly or numbing (you choose) pages yet: What at all is a body? What is recognised as a body and what is intelligible in the immensity of potential bodies? What does it take to become a body in your eyes and ears? And where does a body end? What Judith Butler once wrote I guess… but hey, fullness answers the question in several registers, with several voices, at several times, de-centering the answer even. When Yeates wrote “the center cannot hold”, he certainly meant something else. I however mean the center of late capitalism here.. my body, my temple, my center. It's gone. And then we might be better off talking about the relations of bodies, or at most, their density. Somewhere between “too obvious” and “too abstract” (Wallenhorst), we could speak about the space they have, within themselves and around. Just touching them a little. Like sugar fingers touching the coffee cup in the morning. Not too tight, just around. Just to feel a little bit of stickiness and excitement. Sugar with caffeine is a more accurate test of a contemporary, capitalist body than any medical exam. Are you awake? Are you getting called by addiction? And have you forgotten the colonial history of your drugs yet? It’s a test by reaction. This is how I see things touch each other, just a little, not too tight, radiating around a non-existent center, getting called by addiction, full of reaction, most probably non-fairtrade goods with a history on an empty stomach. Fullness in response to a void.

Patsy Lassbo

Patsy Lassbo is a composer and theater maker from Sweden. During their final year at DAS Theater they have dwelled in the notion of dissociation. Mingling with the writings of Maxi Wallenhorst and McKenzie Wark in the field of trans*aesthetics, the work fugue attempts to feel the space-times produced when the self, the body and the world keep detaching from one another. Where do you go when there is nowhere to go? For some of us the answer is: Nowhere ­– not too bad for a kenophile: someone who has an affinity for voids or empty spaces.

Mika Kastner Johnson is a graphic designer working in Sweden and the Netherlands. 
Billy Morgan is a performer and performance maker from the UK.
Ruby Nilsson is a playwright and artist based in Copenhagen.
 

Credits

Patsy Lassbo in collaboration with Mika Kastner Johnson, Ruby Nilsson and Billy Morgan.

Tutor: Joachim Robberecht; External advisors: Daniela Bershan, Juli Reinartz; Special thanks to: Aline Olmos Steler, Magnus Bunnskog, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Marjorie Boston, Shimon Datauker, Roan Lo-a-Njoe, Dave Krooshof, My potatoes

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