Alix Eynaudi: (Im)mobility Salon #1: Institute of Rest(s) meets Tanzfabrik

Uferstudios Berlin Studio 5. Beanbags, books, tableware. Sounds of snoring and flipping pages. I burst in a little late and immediately admitted the difference in the time tissue. Nothing was happening, which proved the statement I had read in the annotation: ‘It is not an event’. My feeling of the constant alert, which I have been experiencing in the past months, smashed into slow and grounding vibes. This aimlessness felt a bit irritating at first (what I’m spending my precious time for?!) but, the discomfort was gone as I dived into an atmosphere of collective research-by-practice. Over four days between 3-6 pm the guests of the ‘(Im)mobility Salon’ were invited to rest and learn together or, in other words, to approach rest both as a mode of inquiry and a methodological stance.

To make a better impression of the Salon it would be relevant to mention some textual works that were encountered in these afternoons. That is what many participants did during the sessions: moving from one book to another, flipping through pages, falling asleep and being interrupted to converse. The books created multiple theoretical and activist contexts, presenting diverse approaches to rest as resistance (Tricia Hersey¹), and more precisely as resistance to the attention economy (Jenny Odell²), and rest as an action of being attentive to what is to potentially emerge (Christian Nyampeta³). Apart from the resting set-up, practices of resting, reading, and translating together were aimed to interrogate and complicate notions of rest.

Accepting this invitation to read and think together, here are some narratives that I grasped throughout the Salon hours.

Rest might be redefined as a rupture in this eternal productivity in both work and leisure – Refusal in both production and consumption. Times of crisis make the idea of pause as a political statement even more urgent. Funding cuts and increased living costs don’t make the precarious artists’ lives any easier. Problematizing self-exploitation as a core condition for the maintenance of the independent dance scene in Berlin has been a hot topic of the past years⁶. In May 2022, Tanzfabrik suspended any productive activity under the fold titled ‘Pause as Resistance’. The team ceased their work “to refuse to perpetuate this constant actionism, constant production and to not accept that there is no way out of capitalism⁷.” But as the team stressed, this pause was possible from a privileged position of the funded institution.

The idea of refusal to work or pause makes me think about the ironic fate of a strike in the neoliberal project-based economy. As self-employed in the attention economics, you only hurt yourself by refusing to work. In her 2015 lecture, Hito Steyerl⁸ mentioned Yugoslavian former artist  Goran Djordjevic, who organised the International Artists’ Strike in 1979. The story goes quite desperately: the artists invited to join the strike replied that they were already on strike, that is, they were not creating new works, and it did not affect anything.

This very bodily-informed approach to production is no less political than a collective action. Even though it focuses on the body of the individual, this is not just a self-help tactic. As Audre Lorde writes on self-care: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.⁹” Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, the discourse of rest leads us to revision of the value of time and being. Instead of considering productivity as the ultimate measure of value and instrumentalising rest for its sake, it brings up the idea that sounds crazy to neoliberal culture, that a non-productive life is valuable by itself. 

I spent the first hours of the Salon in sweet memories of the collectives that I have been lucky to be a part of. Some of these collectives were places of rest, like the League of Tenders¹⁰ – an imaginary organisation whose annual congresses looked more like a holiday gathering with the people who became a community for one another. Some of them were places of co-instituting, like the Radical Reveries project – a collective analytical and speculative mapping of contemporary art in Russia, the discontents of the artists who are part of it, as well as our fantastical ideas ranging from political utopias to concrete practical suggestions. Among them there were so-called Sweet Reveries, a kind of answer to how to keep the community alive and caring. I’ll list them here as a rhyme for the (Im)mobility Salon. Here they go:  
· Reconsider and recognize the value of labour of reproduction 
 
· Maintain a balance between the value of keeping independent spaces alive and the value of art production: washing cups is just as important as making meanings 
 
· Brag about the amount of rest, not overwork
 
· Practice hospitality: create friendly environments, share available resources, develop connections and cohesion within the community  
 
· More room for experimentation!