Viktorija Ilioska: It could be something very minimal (2019)

“It could be something very minimal” is rarely that.

It is a long-term performative research project and collaboration between Viktorija Ilioska, Patrick Faurot, and Max Smirzitz.

“It could be something very minimal” is the long-term performative research collaboration between Viktorija Ilioska, Max Smirzitz and Patrick Faurot dealing with affective permutations and modulations of bodies and space. The project is fungal, growing, shrinking and reforming each time according to the demands of its milieu and the cross-tendencies of its assemblatic relations. It is their subjective intra-active being in reductionism, virtuosity, aesthetics, immersion, plasticity and cheapness. This time there is a laser show and a costume change.

Viktorija Ilioska, Max Smirzitz and Patrick Faurot met at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies and are working together since 2017. So far, they have staged three performances of their research “It could be something very minimal”. The fourth and fifth instalments will take place in Skopje and Frankfurt am Main, respectively. Combining their experiences in dance and choreography, experimental electronic music, digital projection and theoretical research, their work establishes a highly affective space and relation to the audience. Their interests are diverse and often shifting, but always return to the potentiality of the body and bodies.

We are developing a working methodology that we have called the Fungal Methodology. This methodology has produced visible instantiations of our work three times since the beginning of 2018. Although it shows itself in different stagings or rehearsals, it is actually never there, but located in an ever-present elsewhere. We are challenging the ontological and temporal premises of the concept project. Our working process is concerned both with the discovery of new mushrooms and with mapping and understanding the larger sculpture or context beneath our feet / behind our consciousness. This means that the process is not teleological in nature, as the performances don’t follow one another towards the goal of a final performance, but they rather stand beside each other. We are much more sympathetic to the concepts of the virtual and the actual proposed by Brian Massumi. The virtual is a field of potentiality, out of which an actuality emerges. We refuse to disentangle the virtual from “It could be something very minimal.”