While researching Andean dance, Fabian Barba and Esteban Donoso felt trapped by its visual force. As if blinded, they were tempted to overlook their own lack of comprehension about that culture. Trying to escape the danger of falling into an exotifying gaze, they closed their eyes and set out to devise mechanisms that purposely escape the pitfalls of visuality.
Slugs' Garden is an immersive space for tactile contemplation. It's a habitat to be calmly dwelled in, a playground of subtle sensations. It’s an intimate context in which we can consider our relation to our surroundings - to other people and other objects - and let it morph, unintendedly.
Slugs' Garden is also the time to let us experience minute events of seemingly no consequence. Have you ever surprised yourself playing with a piece of paper that your fingers found lying somewhere? This is the time to let those small gestures mushroom to the centre of our attention, and become the core events of a meaningless universe full of sense.
Like a garden, it's a space to spend some quiet time, having nothing to do or think about in particular. This slugs' garden is there to be inhabited and to be played with; an exploration of the space, an experience of time. It's to wear no shoes. It's where things grow. It's when we cultivate our interest on insignificant incidents. Here we don't walk, we don't skip. Here we take the time to touch our environment, and to caress it, centimeter by centimeter. We slide through it slowly, with no specific intention, wandering without plans, having no goal to achieve.
It is a time we take to grow into slugs. It's a slug farm. It's a slug culture.
2013
April Initial concept formulated by Fabian Barba and Esteban Donoso (Quito, Ecuador)
July 29 - August 2 First workshop and public performances, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) (Quito, Ecuador)
2014
June 9 - 14 Workshop and public performances, The Studio Sessions, WorkspaceBrussels (Brussels, Belgium)
June 16 - July 2 Series of visiting artist workshops, public performance, Decolonial Summer School, University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University (Middelburg, Netherlands)
October 11 - 12 Premier, deSingel International Arts Campus (Antwerp, Belgium)