Playground

Playground – a vast, open free space set for socio-cultural, physical-embodied and artistic creative explorations. Often deeply associated with the developmental journey of humans as children, it has historically remained a boundless space of raw discovery, joy and social bonding. From spaces fecund with human potential, playgrounds have transformed, in much of the late twentieth century, into normative, adult spaces – determined and managed by adults as to what people (both as children and adults) should explore, how to consume and perform play. Attendant to this is how to determine the safety and surveil interaction with others.

This special volume of ISSUE is dedicated to a series of critical inquiries into the field of performance curricula, pedagogies and practices. Informed by changing positionalities in performing arts education and emerging interdisciplinary approaches in performance and experience making, these inquiries were germinated and crystallised at a landmark conference, Arrhythmia: Performance Pedagogy and Practice, held in Singapore in June 2021 amid a raging pandemic.

The 2021 issue focuses on studying Tropical Lab.

Artist learning and practicing environments have historically been defined around concepts of an atelier, which is not merely a hosting space but one that embodies practices, conversations, critiques, references, and histories. Contemporary artist learning environments have evolved to encompass found and transitional sites and group gatherings and activities to facilitate continuous learning towards formal and informal pedagogies.

The 2021 issue is Mobilities.

The study of mobilities over the centuries – of peoples, cultures, ideas, ideologies – speaks to the integral nature of the human condition to be constantly on the move, to be moved. Nature and its constitutive environments were prime conditions for the mobility of peoples as communities. Subsequently, as humans organised themselves, commerce, ideologies, religions and education became key movers of peoples as individuals.

Three perspectives anchor the will to erase.

These three perspectives form the basis on which one can help ascertain the current station of contemporary society. Looking through the prism of art, politics, power, technology, spirit, and reality-visual culture and ideas, can the notion to easily erase or delete be seen to relativise our understanding of truths today? Moreover, the will to delete is an integral part of digital socialisation today as such it affords the emergence of new cultural myths and forms. How do these manifest in contemporary art and visual culture?

What do we make of ‘sense’ today? How do we make sense today?

As an interplay of words, moods and ideas, the rich literature around sense provides of us knowing all too much through time. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell provided a useful starting point in meaning-making or for us to make sense of the world, whilst Marshall Mcluhan and Walter Ong introduced and elaborated on the sensorium or sensory apparatus that envelopes us.

An odd intuitive feeling warms our heart and consciousness - déjà vu.

As migrating strangers, in search of a purpose, become common bedfellows of past and future they cite, recite, incite, and prophesize a paradox; A paradox which is a reverberating soundscape of change, of return. One where both cancel each other out in an audiotized schematic, whirling away only to remain a citation in memory. To attempt to cite, translate, decipher and re-member that moment of paradox fails as the speed of technologized everyday resists the mere attempt.

A play with a dreamscape where a new fictional world interplays rapid dreams, digital desires and humorous nightmares resuscitating flailing histories and memories of an expired epoch. It is a moment where art seeks contingency over agency; mobility over fixity; and burial over excavation. In this Issue, artists, curators and scholars traverse land and sea; cities and communities; ideas and ideologies; and images and imaginings to mediate on multiple notions of histories, geographies, politics, economies and aesthetics: thereby producing a rich reflection on an emerging new world/s through the lens of art and its imagining.

The focus of the issue is islands. Providing an aesthetic, critical and philosophical reading of islands, this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to postulate islandic imaginations and potentialities as cultural, political and environmental concerns outline their existence in a fast-morphing geo-political space.

A port of call is a heterotopic site where nautical imaginings contain the mobility of nations, cultures, powers and maritime and economic trade over time. In this issue, art writers, critics and artists reflect and engage with the multiple entries and exits inherent in ports to serve as an aide-memoire to the ancient yet most contemporary of spaces, the port.

Of the theme Echo:

Walter Benjamin once compared translation to hearing an echo in a forest. Such a metaphor for the act of translation suggests the sonic if not oral dimension of language and reminds us of the way in which there is a space between the original and its repetition. Translation then is a rich terrain of exploration for the arts.