CPPM INTELLECTUAL & ARTISTIC TRAJECTORY

CPPM intellectual & artistic trajectory

1. Where I started

I began, I think, believing that presence meant fusion. Song of the Goat opened the year pursuing "total harmony between voice and body," and without ever deciding to, I adopted that harmony (of voice, movement) as the standard against which everything else would be measured — so that when Lloyd Newson arrived a few weeks later and deliberately split voice from movement, refusing the synaesthetic dream, it read to me as a provocation rather than simply another option on the table... I didn't yet know there was a table.

I also arrived certain — bodily certain — that technique was hierarchy made visible. At INSAS, Ultima Vez had become "the ultimate benchmark for our physical teachers," and insidiously, without ever naming it as such, I had placed contemporary dance virtuosity "on an insurmountable pedestal." By the end of a showing, my mind was already chastising me for not being mindful enough about every choreographic detail — as if precision were the only proof of seriousness.

Politically, I inherited a strange split. At home, we didn't talk about psychology, feelings, spirituality — "only politics, professional work... but never about how that art actually impacted our inner experience." Rationality was the social currency that bought belonging. So somewhere very early, without anyone stating it as a rule, I understood: thinking is safe, feeling is a risk you take alone.

Visually, I came in trained physically and intellectually (but clearly not emotionally) — an art historian for the last few years, more fluent in reading a painting than in letting emotions and drawings happen to me live. And my body arrived as something to correct rather than something to trust: "as rigid as a concrete block," shaped by "a very turbulent birth and paternal genes devoid of flexibility" — hips that would not release no matter how hard I asked them to. Somehow I still have those blocks, but it seems they are slowly being displaced.

2. What destabilised me

I think the most destabilising process was the CPPM pedagogical structure itself, both on the inter-relational level and, consequently, on the artistic one.

This included the natural distribution and relational hierarchy that formed in the rooms, but also how each of us had to navigate our own conditioning and knowledge — for example, when I wanted CPPM to take responsibility for sharing clear information about the Jan Fabre trial... Ivana then tried to discredit me by saying, "I didn't know anything." Fortunately, I had already shared with my classmates all the official information and open letters from their ex-performers explaining the context, so there was no backlash against me...

But this kind of collective backlash — the kind that can happen within a group when you stand alone for something — was the most difficult thing to navigate. Because it brought a deep ontological exhaustion, rather than physical and artistic challenges.

These kinds of frictions were the hardest part to deal with, because over time they can arouse and cultivate deep feelings — self-hatred, anger, mépris — that then become very difficult to treat inside and with people you're in contact with every day... As this act of shared presence is reinforcing and blurring the patterns that have been established silently.

Naming what "ontological exhaustion" actually is — new, from the Yorgos/MAI entry. The term recurs, months later, with a full definition attached: it "happens when you fight hard to remain yourself, to hold your core values, while immersed in interrelations/environments that don't have the capacity to understand (and therefore respect) your growth. You extinguish yourself by resisting with peace instead of conflict — and the consequence is that you keep functioning normally on the surface, while the exhaustion settles under your skin." Read backward against this entry, the Fabre-trial episode was not simply a difficult moment among others; it was the first recorded instance of the exact mechanism the Yorgos entry later names — governmentality, in Foucault's sense, absorbed and metabolized silently rather than fought openly, at cost to "your survival and identity mechanisms."

3. What I resisted

The Guest Artists who brought me the most resistance — both intellectually and inside the body — were: Lloyd Newson, Sasha Pepelyaev, Guillaume Pigé, and Imanuel Schipper.

Not because of the intensity of the program, but because I had a strong reaction against their cultural systems of belief. It was resistance in the sense that it pushed me toward self-destructive behaviours — behaviours that were not aligned with who I am. Most of the time, this was closely tied to the personality, integrity, and personal process of the Guest Artists themselves.

With the other Guest Artists, I was also resisting on many levels — but in a way that expanded my creative process instead of diminishing it (or censoring it, as in the case of Imanuel Schipper).

4. What I retained

From Song of the Goat and from Ultima Vez, an "organic discipline" (both vocal and physical) I rebuilt from its wreckage.

From Ivana and Troubleyn, a deeper access to how artists can bloom within my own country's cultural landscape.

From Marco, the peripheral thinking that unlocked my drawing process.

From Stacy, the unapologetic pleasure of taking the stage with whatever emotionality, physicality, shame, or confidence I'm going through.

From Henry, the inner-world-to-outer-world building methodology (mapping from the inside to reveal it externally).

From Eddie, the discovery of bodily self-expression when staying stubbornly with what's there, while responding to conceptual material (which is really my thing, I have to say!).

From Gecko, the reunification through the breath — opening the possibility of synchronicity within an impossible ensemble.

From Roel & Arjan, the inner pleasure of the body in simply tasting space and time, and being able to let that happen alongside others experiencing the same expansion of the senses — a pleasure I would later theorize, via Stiegler, as a horizontal ecology of co-relation: presence not held, as in Abramović's vertical model, but co-authored, redistributed across the group as "a pharmacology of attention... my body calibrates yours, yours recalibrates mine."

From Jeremy Nedd, his chillness rewiring any nervous system in the room — and, therefore, the ability to build a real container welcoming all types of bodies and neurological patterns.

From Clément Layes, his sense of philosophical divagation, and his way of embodying philosophy in his craft — his relation to mind and body through transformative rituals such as the Demon's Meditation.

From Ephia & Vincent, their ability to stay grounded in the natural world and hold the space in the studio for both humans and nature.

From Sarah Dowling, her amazing pedagogical skills and her ability to hold the space and build the environment needed for your body's score to switch from one state to another.

From Yorgos — substantially expanded, new. His relation to the actor's presence, considered as a muscle to train like everything else, was the least of what I took from those weeks.

The larger inheritance is a pedagogical stance I can now name precisely: a durational setting with no mentoring feedback on the aesthetics of our artistic choices — a frame I initially misread as absence or abandonment, and came to understand instead as "morphogenetic": it is specifically the removal of a prescribed outcome that makes my responsibility as an artist total, needing no external validation to be ethical.

From this frame I retain three concepts I arrived at while writing my new professional profile — Embodied Philosophy (philosophy done as and through the body, trauma and repetition used as methods of thought rather than illustrations of an idea), Mythopoetic Visual Arts (digging the myths inscribed in the body through drawing as dream-work), and Parrhēsiastic Performance (performance as the container in which truth becomes a risk the moment it is spoken, in Foucault's double sense: exhibiting one's life as radically other and thereby exposing it to danger, or standing with an "openness of heart" before the Master, risking safety in the leap of submission). I also retain, from the same weeks, Richard Schechner's concept of restored behavior — behavior "lived, twice-behaved, never for the first time" — as the mechanism running underneath every one of the fast's durational exercises: an everyday gesture extracted from the narrative that ordinarily justifies it, repeated past the point that narrative can hold, until what remains is the gesture itself, uncoupled from meaning. And I retain Despina Zacharopoulou's re-description of violence — not as transgression or spectacle, but as "a mechanism that would turn the performer's body into flesh," so that trauma stops being a fixed, primary loss and becomes, instead, a "corporeal trace" or "phantasm" available for transmutation through repetition, rather than something to be healed.

From Artaud, despite everything I resisted in him: the vocabulary I still reach for every week. Cruelty as what acts. Language destroyed in favor of bodily poetry. I never stopped using his words even while refusing his sacrificial fate.

From the sacrificial lineage I'm supposedly questioning — Abramović, Mishima, Liddell — I kept in my heart their artistic freedom, I guess. I kept the respect for a body willing to risk itself completely to explore human conditions. What I retain now, more precisely, is not the sacrificial gesture itself but Liddell's own question, which I have made mine: whether one is "drawn to live a life of art, or rather to maintain an artistic career" — and the recognition, articulated in the same entry, that what struck me most in both Liddell and Abramović was not their extremity but "an infinite gentleness that emanates from them... in their capacity to act on their human condition," an erasure of vanity rather than of identity.

From the Renaissance and Bauhaus models I named and rejected, I kept, quietly, a real respect for craft transmitted with care — I praise formal rigor in the very same breath I'm arguing against vertical authority.

From Debord, even while I keep living inside the spectacle he warned about, I kept the tool and the act of sublimation.

From Stiegler, a diagnostic vocabulary I did not have before this year — disindividuation, automatic nihilism, the pharmacology of attention — which let me name, for the first time, what a devising group is actually resisting when it insists on shared, embodied, desynchronized-then-resynchronized time against the pace an institution or an industry would otherwise impose.

From myself, my resilience, flexibility of mind, and survival skills.

5. What Recurred

Fifteen axes, and I can trace every one of them to a specific week, a specific sentence:

Form / politics — Newson and DV8 entangling form with social urgency, against Decroux's and Viewpoints' claims to pure or horizontal form. I keep returning to this exact comparison.

Mastery / receptivity — Ultima Vez and Decroux's authority against Marco's affectability and Furukawa's possession.

Structure / freedom — borrow the master's structure, refuse full obedience to it. Every single time — including, by the year's end, on Yorgos's own explicit terms ("don't hold onto it, it will change tomorrow").

Technique / autonomy — Renaissance and Bauhaus, rejected, against my own "organic discipline."

Representation / presence — Bausch's existential presence against Wilson's architecture of the sensible; Rothko's representation of suffering against its claimed spiritual depth.

Image / event — the termite I sketched from an urge I couldn't explain; the nightmare I drew a year before any of this began and returned to mid-crisis; the audio walk's fixed AI voice against the live fact of walking through Venice.

Intensity / violence — Fabre's "structured transgression, not aggression nor spectacle," against Artaud's self-consuming excess; sharpened, by the Yorgos/MAI entry, into Despina Zacharopoulou's distinction between violence as transgression (the 1970s tradition — Abramović, Nitsch, O'Dell) and violence as a mechanism for shattering essentialist categories altogether, restoring "the sensorial humanity within the body itself."

Sacrifice / transformation — the whole opening question of this term, with Ephia standing as the counter-example to Marina, to Mishima, to Angelica.

Body as instrument / body as knowledge — the bass as "an extension of her own flesh rather than an instrument," against the sexualized bassist stereotype I explicitly refused; six months of unexplained pain I'm still learning to read rather than silence — pain that, read backward through "Before Ephia" and the Yorgos entry together, now has a name (ontological exhaustion) it did not have when it started.

Authorship / collective creation — most of these Weekly Questions are mine alone; the audio walk with Edward is the one place this year where authorship was genuinely shared.

Human / more-than-human — Ephia's non-human body; the bass approached "as if she were an entity discovering it for the first time."

Control / affectability — Marco's phrase, in Term 1 and again in Term 3, unchanged, still true.

Rational / imaginal knowledge — my family's split against Corbin's third register.

Art / politics — Rancière, whom I fell in love with as a teenager because he taught me never to separate the two, resurfacing this year in the censorship entry, in the neurodivergence entry.

Sacred / profane — named outright in the Song of the Goat entry ("the boundaries of this divide are meant to be blurred"), and returned to, in Term 3, in front of Bosch, Pasolini, Beuys, Castellucci.

Sixteen: Individuation / disindividuation — new. Stiegler's diagnosis of a culture that no longer transmits shared horizons, only "instantaneous flows capable of modeling behavior in real time," against a Weekly Question ritual that is, itself, a solitary, self-authored technology of protention — a private rebuilding of the very capacity Stiegler says the culture at large is losing. First named explicitly in Term 2, but visible retroactively in every week that treats writing as "a mechanism of self-preservation."

Seventeen: Extraction / inhabitation — new. Ephia's ethic of mapping and inhabiting rather than analyzing and extracting, against the extractive, citational method this entire document is built from — named explicitly only in the dreaming-body entry, but operative, unnamed, in every week that came before it.

6. What Changed

Theory stopped being a shield and became something closer to a companion.

In Term 1, I used citation to keep material at arm's length. By Term 3, in Melpignano, the same density — Tiqqun, Corbin — sits inside the confession instead of standing in front of it. Ayahuasca and Agamben in the same paragraph. That's not less thinking. It's thinking with nowhere left to hide behind. By the Yorgos/MAI entry, this has become close to total: Foucault, Deleuze, Despina Zacharopoulou, Agamben, Spinoza, and Klossowski are no longer marshalled to defend a position from outside it — they arrive already inside the account of my own spasm during the three-hour performance, indistinguishable from the description of the event itself.

Irrationality's meaning shifted without ever fully resolving — I wrote, in the very same entry, that it "leads to exile, misunderstanding" and that embracing it "feels like a vocation that reconnects me entirely in an inextinguishable joy." Both sentences are still true. I haven't chosen between them. I'm not sure I will.

My relationship to authority moved, I'm still not sure in which direction. Probably recognizing my own inner authority helped me to understand other people's, and why they are acting the way they do. Presence also changed definition multiple times this year depending on the Guest Artist. Different rooms to inhabit depending on the form, methodology, or craft used. I still want to find my own access point, my own definition of it. Yorgos's own working definition — presence as a muscle, trained rather than summoned — is the most recent addition to a list that also now includes Stiegler's horizontal, co-regulated presence and Marina's vertical, willed one; I have not yet had to choose between them, and increasingly suspect the choice itself may be the wrong question.

7. Where My Practice Currently Sits — and Sits Not

I believe my acting skills (learning texts, accessing emotions, etc.) are quite far away from me at the moment, as my previous training didn't really build a strong foundation on which I could rely to "survive" CPPM!

Also, my embodied practice no longer organizes itself around getting something right; it organizes itself around states I can enter through receptivity. This is close, I now realize, to what Despina Zacharopoulou describes as the performer's role: "not to enact, illustrate or produce something, but... to be disposed to be affected by — and affect — other bodies, while being used by them" — a definition of care as "the maintenance of one's ability to be useful," which is the ethical shape my own language of "receptivity" was reaching for without yet having the vocabulary for it.

Analyse the intersection of embodied/physical practice, theoretical analysis, visual/material dramaturgy, political embodiment, ritual/imaginal/transformative practice, and critical resistance to sacrificial models.

My relationship to the visual has moved from analysis to creation.

Politically, I've learned to use my voice, even in conflicting and paradoxical situations, to preserve what was needed.

8. Three Analytical Lenses

I want to be honest: none of these was in my head at the start of the year. I did not walk into the Black Box in September already carrying "Mystical Feminism" or "Aesthetic of Violence" or "Visual Arts in Performativity" as categories. They only exist now because I went back and read a year of my own questions side by side.

Mystical Feminism. An entirely female sonic lineage I reached for in Term 1 — Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Moor Mother, Ka Baird, Eliane Radigue, Anna von Hausswolff — sitting right next to my refusal of the sexualized performer image audiences kept projecting onto me. A discomfort with "the feminine puritanism of Mary" left over from Catholic school. Art named, that same term, as "a pretext... to access spirituality."

By Term 2 the political edge sharpens — I turned bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, and Emma Goldman directly onto our own group, and onto what it costs a neurodivergent female body to mask.

It's only in Term 3, in Melpignano, that mysticism and feminism actually fuse into one thing rather than two things sitting near each other: Corbin gives me the imaginal register; I call Marina, without flinching, "the most sacrificial woman artist"; I turn Tiqqun's Young-Girl directly against myself; and I choose Furukawa's possession over Tanaka's dissolution — receptivity over control, named, for the first time, as a lineage I inherited specifically from women's voices and women's sacrifices... not from men's structures. A last thread, drawn from the Yorgos/MAI entry: Despina Zacharopoulou's own theorization of care and use — via Agamben's "use appears as the relation to an inappropriable" — belongs to this same female genealogy of receptivity, and gives the lens something it lacked until now: not only figures to identify with (Marina, Angelica, Furukawa) but a female theorist's method for thinking use-of-oneself without possession.

Reading it backward, it looks like a lens. Living it forward, it was just one true thing after another that happened to rhyme.

Aesthetic of Violence. This one starts on day one and I didn't even notice: Fabre's cruelty, read against Artaud, as "a radical but structured transgression... not aggression nor spectacle" — I was already, without naming it, distinguishing force from brutality. Newson's inversion of the theatre of cruelty, language made to bear real weight again. Then it goes quiet for most of Term 2, resurfacing only through Decroux's "authority of structure" as one more register of controlled force. It only sharpens into something I'd call a lens when the sacrificial question opens Term 3 — Mishima's eros fused with death, Angelica's staged fake suicides, Marina's endurance — violence now aimed at myself, and finally, genuinely, under question rather than simply fascinated by.

Despina Zacharopoulou's historicization of the same aesthetic, distinguishing the 1970s tradition, where violence served to expand physical and mental limits, revive rituals of transgression, and criticize audience passivity, from the contemporary use I have been practicing without naming it — where the aim is no longer transgression but "shattering essentialist categories and ideological hierarchies altogether," returning "the sensorial humanity within the body itself." Read against Deleuze's account of Bacon's spasm — "the action of invisible forces on the body" — my own first spasm, mid-performance, under self-imposed respiratory restriction, is less an isolated bodily event than the exact point where this lens's two terms (aesthetic, violence) stop being opposable and become one operation.

I started the year asking how to represent cruelty on a stage. I'm ending it asking whether force can be made beautiful at all without inherently reproducing the harm it's supposed to be about.

Visual Arts in Performativity. This is the one that was visible earliest and understood latest. Term 1 already has an entry almost daring me to name it — "Diving into the Connection Between Sensory Impulses and the Visual Art-Translation I Can Make Out of It on Stage" — and I was already using Deleuze on Bacon to define subtext.

But it was still a habit then, not a personal method. It only becomes method through repetition: a hyena and termite sketched from a bodily urge I still can't fully explain, a nightmare drawn a full year before the program that I returned to mid-crisis, a review of the Rothko play conducted with an art historian's eye rather than a performer's. It only becomes dramaturgy — not commentary, but construction — in Term 3, in the Bosch/Pasolini/Beuys/Castellucci essay, and again, materially rather than only theoretically, in "Before Ephia," where the drawing exhibition itself becomes the dramaturgical object: catalogue texts written for each piece, a scenography built under pressure, and a closing exchange with a sixty-year-old sculptor who advised me to "erase all the references... and see how the content was sufficient by itself" — advice that names, from outside my own vocabulary, exactly the tension between citation-as-method (Chapter 1) and image-as-argument this lens has been circling all year.

A fourth lens, tentatively — Protocol and Restored Duration. I am naming this one provisionally, because unlike the first three it did not emerge from reading the year backward so much as from the very last material available to me: the Yorgos/MAI fast, five days structured entirely by protocol rather than narrative — writing my own name for an hour, opening and closing a door for an hour, sorting rice from lentils for seven hours — each one an instance of Schechner's restored behavior, a gesture repeated past the point where the story that used to justify it can hold, so that what remains is duration and gesture alone. Read backward, this axis was already present without a name — in Roel and Arjan's Viewpoints, in the durational logic of "the neutral container in which the narrative usually unfolds" that "disappears to reveal the actual material being worked: our consciousness," in the "morphogenetic frame" of Yorgos's no-feedback pedagogy itself, where structure is provided by protocol rather than by mentorship. Whether this deserves to stand as a fourth lens alongside the other three, or whether it is better read as the method underneath Aesthetic of Violence and Visual Arts in Performativity both, is a genuinely open editorial question I am leaving for the next pass.

9. Open Questions

What are my conditions for presence to emerge?

Where does my artistic freedom lie?