Papier multiforme, Papier comestible’ is ‘a choreography and an installation, a failed magic trick and a picture book which you can enter into’ (van der Putt 2018). I developed this performance practice since 2014 with magician Tilman Andris and book designer Jamillah Sungkar. Its rehearsal experiments with vicarious participation - following Sruti Bala (2018) - and ‘implicated’ spectatorship. Through the practice of magic where stooges play a role and the practice of reading where readers are hosts, I research ‘implicatedness’ at the collective scale: how are spectators implicated in the events of other spectators’ imaginations?  

The performance ‘Papier multiforme, Papier comestible’ is a chapter in my PhD dissertation ‘Reading in Performance, Lire en Spectacle’ (Coventry University, DAS Research Amsterdam). I investigate shifts in spectatorship when the audience reads in the real time of performance. The rehearsal at Crisis Collective! comes after a first moment at the THIRD Annual Forum in Amsterdam in 2018 and it precedes the submission of the performance as chapter in Coventry in May 2020. SAR2020 is the occasion to share responses to the performance by invited artists: responses through magic (Augusto Corrieri), film (Agnese Cornelio), and sound (Margarida Guia). SAR2020 is the timely chance to discuss the disappearance of the performance as chapter in my thesis. In the future, the performance will perform a gap in my dissertation. What is this gap doing? In what other ways does the performance bleed through the dissertation?  

At Crisis Collective! ‘Papier multiforme, Papier comestible’ belongs to the strand 'Various Rehearsals'. Yet, it has affinities with ‘Hammer and Mirror’: participation as reproduction of neoliberal forces of precarity is put into question, following Bojana Kunst (2016). The rehearsal shares concerns with ‘The Great Conversation’: ‘implicated’ spectatorship is a proposal of ‘being in the world’.

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue