AND Lab Directives

The Directives Territory, Care & Soma

AND Territory

This guideline is both the ancestor and the future of the AND Lab.

It was through research in/with the Territory that what would become the Modus Operandi AND emerged, still in Brazil and in the early 2000s, under the name Ethnography as Situated Performance, in the fold between anthropology and dance. At that time, the practice of Reparar took place on a "large scale", especially in urban territories and in a relationship of immersion and enchantment with the street and common spaces. Transposing the anthropological methodology of fieldwork to a plan of creation of situated propositions and performances of the encounter, it was through the territory - experienced on a human scale, either by walking or by remaining - that Fernanda Eugenio then proposed to map local issues emerging from the relationship between geography and architecture, macro and micropolitics, habits and inhabiting, codes and deviations, contiguity and coexistence, conflicts and communions, visibility and invisibility.

As a sensitive state, the exercise of Reparar summon, still today, both the modulation of movement and that of pause, being experienced as an exercise of a simultaneously subjective and spatio-temporal displacement (as an abdication of interpretation and 'interpretosis' in favor of traversing and describing). And, at the same time, also as a commitment to stay, persist, linger in the investigated territory and do with it - and for it.

The guideline of approaching the issues and concerns via the Territory accompanies all the following modulations of the Modus Operandi AND and is based on the prerogative of the collective event to the detriment of the authority of the subject and on an ethic of extracting from a situated listening the criteria for each choice, gesture or move - for the care-curatorship of the common. It is assumed that the territory embeds the incarnate wisdom to be peered - via Reparar - in order to be able to make decisions that are, also and always, de-scissions. 'De-scission', an undoing of the split between I and the other, and the surrounding environment, allowing the reconnection with a felt sense of inseparability.

If research with the Territory, especially in urban areas, marked the beginning of the MO_AND, it is now also pointing to its future. In the most recent developments of the Modus Operandi AND, an inclination grows that takes us, more and more, not only out of the studio, but also out of the city. The Territory, now expanded into Land (and Earth), reappears in the new modulations of MO_AND's care-curatorship games and ritual propositions, which are dedicated to the direct experience of inseparability and take place in 'natural' environments, experiencing contact and friction with a more-than-human biodiversity. This movement has, little by little, carried the AND Lab into a 'LAND becoming' - which is concretely manifested in the emergence of the LANDscape courses of the School of Reparar, which take place in retreat mode, in locations far from urban centers, and signal a tendency/desire to AND Lab's own future settlement outside the city.

AND Care

The crossing of Care manifests itself pervasively in the AND Lab, as an ethics, a way of doing and living, and also as an inherent dimension and somatic-political effect of the constant practice of MO_AND itself.

The enunciation of Care as a guideline and and a constant direct action of the AND Lab, although it was always there, in the very act of Reparar as repairing, was only explicitly delineated from the encounter with the area of ​​Transdisciplinary Psychology - 'accident' that led to the emergence of a field of long-term research, now covered in the MO_AND + Clinic-Care durational collaborative project.

The consequences that the practice of MO_AND brings to the plane of care and subjectivity production have been explored both in university research and within the AND Lab itself, with the creation and unfolding of practices aimed specifically at the formulation of the affections experienced in play and the recognition of emerging micro-transformations.

The guideline of care as the moto for presence in the Modus Operandi AND is based on the commitment to the transversal exercise of 'co(m)passionate comppearence' and dis-illusionment, through disidentification with predetermined norms and the activation of politicized, non-hierarchical and disseminated modulations of love. Thus, caring is closer to healing, while healing is assumed not as the reestablishment of order or a state previously defined as good or healthy, but as a curatorship gesture: practice of re-membering, re-imagining and re-invention of oneself and the world.

AND Soma

The Soma guideline, encompassing the injunction between the intimate and the political, and between the micropolitics of reciprocity practiced at MO_AND and spirituality, is the one that was most recently recognized and settled in formulation at the AND Lab.

Once again, although it has 'always been there' - in the focus given to incarnation/presentation as the way to take a position, as well as to IT ('ISSO'), the unnameable affection, as the motor of the event -, this crossing has been explicitly addressed through the multiplication, in recent years, of modulations of the AND game that take the body-territory as 'board' and allow approaching the marks of the Irreparable in each one of us, questioning in a more direct way the sensitive matter that constitutes and 'inseparates' us.

This guideline points out the transversality, in the practice of MO_AND, of an expanded understanding of the body and the corporeality, taken as a privileged instance to work on dis-illusionment and de-scission, by practicing fractalizing perception and in/ex-corporation, through the exercise of Reparar as a practice of listening to our sensations and co-sensing/co-feeling with what is here and beyond us, so constituting a safe field to re-member the Irreparable.

Invoking the nomination Soma is part of an orientation that addresses the body as a (un)folded aggregate. Soma is the physical body, the 'each body', but it is also multiplicity, bodies. It embraces the physical and the energetic, the trans and the infra-personal; the individual and the ancestral; the social, the cultural, the historical, but also the cosmological and the infinitesimal. It is also the recognition of the continuity between all bodies in the vastest, more-than-human body of Life as a common background that comprises all manifested and yet to be manifested forms.

The Soma guideline thus underlines the search for ways to reconnect with the sensitive experience of inseparability as a cross-cutting aim of the entire constellation of MO_AND practices, and as a gesture that is both political and spiritual.