During this last year we realised that a lot of the physical and mental states of our performances are tangential to the way children behave and relate with their surroundings. Our constant efforts to resist to linear time, to merge the concrete and abstract, to integrate concepts of multiplicity and simultaneity, to establish a non-hierarchical relation between movement, voice, text and objects are all strong directions in our work but it looks like they are also very intrinsic to children.

So our first desire for this residence would be to benefit from this close contact with the children and just ask them how they do it. How they do what we try to do in such a self- conscious and intellectualized way. But this would probably lead us to questions as common as how do you see, feel, touch...? Ending up with How to be a child? Although this could be an interesting starting point, if we want to learn something from them we need to find a way to address these questions without reducing the potential of our encounter. And, if we are to work together like we are supposed to do in this residency, maybe we will have to come up with a common problem or question from where we unfold a direction that hopefully will escape our limited expectations. And there is something in the way children generate questions that is simultaneously metaphysical, ontological, aesthetical, banal and unpredictable that blows up the artificiality with which we conceal our ideas.

So maybe the best will be to build a space, an inner/outer space, where through a series of creative tools we have been using in our processes of creation and in meetings with other artists we will be able to get to know each other and evoke several questions while moving, dancing, constructing performances, mind maps, documenting gestures, conceiving objects for several things and nothings. Those tools are based on the use of words as malleable materials, on naming and describing movements and gestures as a way of constructing fictions merging abstraction and concreteness, on visualization and memory as procedures for composing in space. We will be aiming for a kind of flux between materials that can cross any "area" or "medium" without the need for a specialized skill but with the freedom that underlies any creative process.

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Sofia & Vítor, September 2017

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