monday, 13th December 2021

–––10 a.m. Hong Kong / Rome

First meeting with Rebecca Wong Pik Kei on the project. Rebecca is a dancer and choreographer from Hong Kong. We got her contact from Kee Hong, who has known her work for some time and suggested getting her involved. Rebecca works on the body and its stereotypes, desire and sexuality, and she does so in explicit ways, too. https://wongpikkei.wixsite.com/wongpikkei

We talk about the political situation in HK, the limited freedom, and how the situation is changing for women.

And then she tells us a story that we only partially understand because of the language, a story that remains wonderfully obscure to us. It's the story of a walk in the mountains, when they got naked, and people were looking at them from the heights of the forest. The story of a male gaze that consumes.

 

11:30 a.m. ––– Rome / Bilbao.

Call with Leire Vergara - we met while she was in Rome for an artistic residency at the Royal Academy of Spain. We met her several times thanks to Giovanna Zapperi, who created connections, then we started chatting and exchanging ideas. She opened an independent space in Bilbao with other artists/researchers - Bulegoa Z/B, in the neighbourhood of Solokoetxe. A small space, she tells us, where different artistic and research practices meet, starting from the different backgrounds of the founders: dance, choreography, writing, curatorship, sociology. They share a feminist and decolonial approach, and they work on developing critical pedagogies, situated knowledge and collaborative methods. They organise artistic residencies, exchanges, productions. Leire is very close to the activist experience and the independent scene; she also knows about the struggles of cultural professionals in Italy and the occupations that took place in the 2010s. We tell each other things, weaving threads – among militant research, feminism, radical practices. It would be nice to take SO IT IS to Bilbao, and we start thinking about how we could do that. She mentions a programme they organise in June, Material Voices, which includes meetings, installations and performances in an open context, intersecting practices, inventing new formats. 

https://bulegoa.org