As a project that seeks to sow creative/critical responses to performance, LAWN responded to this invitation with the same curiosity: What would it mean to inhabit an international festival, while sitting down with the knots, tensions and problems of a government-run arts organization and its relationship with local artistic ecologies? 

Starting from this question, and in collaboration with Claudia Galhós, Paulo Pinto and Dori Nigro, a programme was developed that included a series of meetings with invited artists and collaborators, including Performing The Archive, a research project and residency space based in Porto, as well as a participatory conversation centered on the history and form of creative and critical responses to performance, the archive as a space for critical thinking and the way in which the construction and writing of narratives can be co-opted by institutions for their own interests. 

To accompany the festival, including performances, workshops and talks, artists were invited to produce reflective texts: AURA, who explores direct and intimate responses through handwritten personal letters; Odete, who explores critical writing through fiction, in a meta exploration of the form as witness and archive keeper; Pedro Vilela, who accompanies performances through reflections and thinks about programming policy against the backdrop of the city's own context, with a proposal for future editions. Accompanied and mentored by Claudia Galhós, Dori Nigro and Paulo Pinto, these commissioned texts present a wide range of intimate, urgent and exploratory writing, which you can find here.

At the same time, LAWN was in residence for two weeks in Studio 1 at CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva, with open doors, where artists, thinkers and festival participants could get together, write, think, visit a small reference library, meet and have conversations about performance practices, writing and DDD itself. 

Comissions:
– Let us cultivate the forest | Pedro Vilela
– The failing gaze | Odete
– Open letter in a context in which dance and critical thinking intersect affectively | Aura