HASARD4

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As chance would have it, on the 7th of March at 1340 the moon will reach its fullness. A disc is set upon us. At exactly the hour, at Fri-Son, in Fribourg, Switzerland, HASARD4 will open to a timely encounter. A creative proposal of a transdisciplinary multiplicity of languages between live arts, conferences, dialogues and cinema. 

 

Five performances, two concerts, three conferences and round tables, lectures, mediation actions, and creative residencies make for a stimulating week. HASARD4 is about writing a story. There is a narrative context yonder a sense of identity. Identity as expression bound to time; An image of ourselves, and our surroundings. The image, that which can be reproduced, in as much as that which happens out of the dexterity of the singular moment.   

 

Chance, time, reality. I would not sport knowledge on these vast infinite topics, but simply propose a flux of stimuli and nourish the creative environment. Dare to exchange, experiment, find, irreverently create anew. Be freak, hip, punk, whatever ticks in your heart. See things differently.

  

The dominant structures in our societal contracts follow a mechanical motion. The consequential provides for a continuum seemingly unalterable process of time. The relational quality that allows for novel dynamics is found confined to diminishing spaces, a sort of last resort beyond the boundaries of desire, very often confused with the power of choice. And choice is why we are here. As we look to the other, within ourselves, the privilege of desire transfigures to the power of resonance. 

At Fri-Son two main staged spaces will centre the creative action to an evolving and constantly changing structure. We will be creating a heaving context to play in, to live a constrained amount of time timelessly.  

 

Hasard Festival was created in 2020 as a result of a need. When most institutions were at odds at how to move beyond complaints and the funnelling public funds, theatres and venues closed, the stage was set for a small international encounter at what was then a garage space in blueFACTORY, that we had recently named the “Gate”.   

 

Hasard 2 and 3 followed from November 2020 into February 2021 to hybrid (in presence and virtual) editions, both deep into covid restrictions and making full use of the tight spaces available. The beauty about these festivals was the feeling of being true to art and our work. New formats were being created. The experience of performance heightened and kept alive. Artist’s cachets were paid directly by ticket sales, and technicians worked on the promise of whatever funding requests we could muster through the squall. The encounter was real.  

 

At Xocolat we tend to find solutions by placing ourselves in the least common denominator, and this is simply because we believe in doing things rather than waiting. Post pandemic scenario presents a saturation of events, festivals, performances, cultural. Many to quality. In the current landscape, what is the need to propose HASARD4? To tempt chance, depart from a preordained destiny and perhaps move closer to a more ideal one? 

 

Setting the tone to the resignification on the value of things, we face the challenge in understanding how it is possible that HASARD4 has not been supported by a single public funded institution. In order to carry our work to completion the production and artistic direction have decided to work without pay with the added generosity of hosts and bénevoles team are all working for free. 

 

We need to convince, generate private funding, battle through and make voice. There is a sort of institutional auto sabotage at stake: if work such as HASARD4 is left unattended, what happens next? Where are public funds being disposed of? Who is deciding? 

 

It is nevertheless unique to see so much engagement in a context such as Switzerland in which artistic and cultural productions are almost exclusively nested in the comfort of institutional ties. Public funds are hijacked by paternalistic and bureaucratic entities that know little  about art, let alone the wealth of generating societal dynamics. We cannot ask a budget driven simplified institution of conceiving the conjunction of the one and the multiple. 

 

This is a moment of extraordinary fast complexification of the human experience. “When I speak of complexity,” explains philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, “I am referring to the basic Latin sense of the word complexus, "that which is woven together".  

 

There seems to be the way of the universe: novelty. Word to the incomparable Terrence McKenna: “Nature abhors habit.” Novelty happens to high frequencies, a sort of vibratory availability. Yet this does not assume an aesthetic expression, fast moving objects or interactions. High frequencies can happen through dimensions that are not only perceptible by our basic senses. A Tibetan monk, to push a common place, can be seemingly unmoving but sustaining extraordinary and complex vibratory interactions.  

 

As humanity we are thrust at the threshold of a quickening evolution towards consciousness. We live our contradiction, we move on. We endure manipulation, concentration of resources, the flattening of miraculous natural environments to dust, institutionalisation of spaces, unconstitutional actions, wars, lies. The nuances are hard knuckled down by absolute driven structures. But this is only one aspect of the myriad possible ways of looking at our reality.  This is a moment of unchallenged transformative power. 

 

How do we detach ourselves from the tendency to accept the absolute as a ruling predicament? Can we redefine and progress from a pure materialistic aspect of reality? Will we dare evidence that structures fall in a moment of strenuous liminality? Perhaps we already have? Can we envisage life in a different way? Governance, economies, social importance? Can it not be different? 

 

To propel us beyond the circumscribing limits of our habits, three conferences and a round tables will drive through the performance works and uncap definitions to pulsating movement. Special guests will open their treasure in practice and understanding and enter directly in relationship with artists, filmmakers and audiences alike.  

 

The small pieces in the puzzle make for the bigger picture. Understanding the passage of time, Phillipe Guillemant, looks towards the future, fundamentally rooted in our present. How we address and create this present with our thoughts, actions, feelings, creative imagination. The present becomes manifest in its entirety, it engulfs not only life, but matter: the curious happening of synchronicity: the amiable collision of moments that become, create, and result from, consciousness.  

As a physicist and having worked with A.I. at Centre National de Recherche Cientifique in France, Guillemant presents scientifically verifiable and experientable solutions to our understanding of reality and time. It is all tied to a sense of “estat d’espirit”, that brings the unseen to our physical relationship to matter. Matter is information. His theory of “double causality” is keyed through the understanding of “retrocausality.” Turn things around: how does the future influences our present? “The second causality, inverted to our habitual causality, or retrocausality, explains how certain causes sometimes derive from their effects, whereas effects are usually supposed to derive from causes. It is an influence of the future on the present that is only possible in a universe that has already been realised or an inverted determinism is at work, analogous to the top-down cosmology of Stephen Hawking.” 

 

Double Causality is the founding concept of a Theory of Synchronicity which naturally brings out the notion of Spirit from a new conception of time involving a subtle process of co-creation of the universe. Yet the most recent  idea exposed by Phillipe Guillemant is the argument that the development and outcome of the last three years (regardless of creed, belief or political affiliation) have taken us off the preordained or determined future, to a different one altogether. The manner in which the new future will happen is still driven by our consciousness and played out by our free will (and chance). However, the ancient, pre-pandemic, future does not cease to have a pull towards the complying of it regardless of it not being our future anymore.

 

Cyrille Javary suggests in the introduction of his marvellous translation of the I Ching, the book of changes: “...all futures are possible, but unless fate intervenes, what happens will depend on our choices.” 

 

Cyrille Javary, author and sinologist, has translated, studied and lived through the fundamental understanding of life as a continuous process. Javary brings ancient awareness, images that speak, oracular processes and the extraordinary pulse of time comprehended in works such as the I Ching, the Tao Te Ting the recurrence of time beyond yet embedded in Nature. Our human nature. Our natural surroundings. The particles of life speak to us in the most immediate intimacy.  

And somehow hasard (chance) comprehends the opposite of how we relate to it in our daily environment: it is the infinite game between what is conditioned and what appertains to our free will. Our common destiny as a species, as a planet, as co-creators is at stake. 

 

Today we have the technical capacity of colliding the minutest of particles to recreate reactions happening in the furthest star. We can capture more than thirteen billion light years in one single image that provides for the consistency of distance as time. Generations of humans have walked the earth and have managed to transmit life, in an act of extraordinary stubbornness, before expiring. Again and again, life has found a way so that we could be born. This is not an anecdote behind our screens or view on demand series. This is reality as deep as it gets. Truth does not play concessions, yet is it light as a feather. 

 

Our attitude to life, our actions, our very thoughts, the manner in which we inhabit time is creating the outcome of our ancestors as much as our future is happening now. In essence, we are responsible for our future as we are for our past. 

 

Cyrille Javary has dedicated his life to understanding that the closest to infinity is nothingness. Coming from mind-blowing historical accounts, ancient Chinese managed to integrate all of our possible actions into the dynamic relationship of sixty-four hexagrams. Each hexagram is made of a sequence of six full or broken lines. Later explained in today's well known Tai Chi circle and the yin and yang, for the I Ching, yin is what is not yet yang, and yang is what is not yet yin. A full line will inevitably become a broken line, there is a constant threshold manifested. 

 

What ancient China understood through the provision of powerful transformative images, was that everything under heaven can be assigned to a specific phase in a system of interlocked correlated cycles.  

 

What are these hexagrams? Biochemist, historian, sinologist, author of “Science and Civilization in China”, Joseph Needham, explained: “The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of a colossal pattern... because their position in an ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behaviour inevitable for them. (…) And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance.” 

 

Resonance: an encounter of cohesive actions that become manifest through the transcending of limits, personally and collectively. Resonance yields similar frequencies to progress. Striking a guitar chord will generate movement to similar tones. Novelty happens out of a frequency that is constantly stimulated to reshape circumstances beyond the immediacy of reality. 

 

At the threshold of what can be defined and what cannot be defined takes us to the heart of things. And it is in our heart that we resonate to life and to the likes of things. As Pato’s Timaeus proposes: “what is akin knows what is akin.”  

 

Working through a matrix of conceptions, such as “time as place”, “matter as information”, “vibratory intelligence”, subtracting time towards the conception of thought, consciousness, the construction of reality, truth, light, future and past can be transformed accordingly.  How this will play out in our proposed encounter HASARD4, through exchange and the opening of artworks and performances calls for a creative act. 

 

HASARD4 proposes creation manifest in a continuous flux, in the relational aspect of things, yet maintaining a nucleic and personal perception. The invitation is to perceive time as a multidimensional net of relations of moments that we build, out of need, through a sequential linear understanding.  Each day a performance will be presented to an in-presence audience, and another streamed to a live interactive framework.  

 

A varied and precise artistic program drives the encounter. Expect the unexpected by Noé Menau and Steven Chakroun from the Compagnie Jeu de Paume. Uncontained fascination happens through the timeless music and sounds of Alberto Barbieris and Bera Romairone. The organic machinations of the depths move through Daniele Bernardi.  A trickster, raw, feminine power looks towards the light in the work of Zoe Maria Gyssler, Lauren Rae Mae, Anna Rose, Alison Adnet. Delicately reach within and count yourself regent of infinite space with Nahum.  

 

The transposition of artistic languages is a key aspect of HASARD4. Dance, theatre, music, visual expression, presence, scientific analysis and cinema all share a common ground. There is a transgression in language and recursion. Five camera.wo.men will aid in capturing audio-visual information. Sometimes this information will be streamed live. Other aspects will be fast edited for publishing online. Most will be provided to “Quantum Jump”,  an authored film to be edited after the festival’s closure.  

 

Filmmakers will not only decide how to capture images or camera movement, they will actively relate to the artist and their work, conference guests, and audience alike. Situations will occur, staged and directed. Scenes will be provoked and scenarios written on the go.  

 

Film director Mauro Andrizzi naturally sees pulling out scenes from the theatrical context and restaging moments in varied locations. He anticipates peripatetic dialogues with Guillemant and Javary as a fil rouge for his film. The streets of Fribourg, the natural landscape, monuments or industrial landscapes, all are possible locations. Andrizzi breathes cinema. As an established screenwriter, director, film d’auteur, and long experience programming for film festivals, his vision sets the tone for cinematic language.  

 

Baptiste Janon, french / fribourgoise filmmaker and documentarist manages to pick an intimate spark on every subject he addresses. Janon’s involvement in the previous Hasard editions also establishes him as a reference point and local connoisseur. His experience in streaming and multi camera is a precise addition to the team. A powerful filmmaking crew is present: François Vermot’s unique photography, Kevin Merz’ masterful documentary  hand, Aurélie Ayer visual compositions, all play a part. 

 

How the cinematic language will be resolved will be decided by the exchange within the furnace of HASARD4. Themes will ebb and churn. Questions will arise. 

 

What is consciousness? Guillemant suggests it is our navigation system through the ten dimensions of time and space proposed by Argentine physician Juan Martín Maldacena*.  *Maldacena’s work through string theory and the holographic principle is today considered a turning point in the value of quantum physics.  

 

The order of our brain and physical connections that provide for our state of consciousness result from a blink-of-an-eye timescale in correspondence to the understanding age of our known universe. * the universe, as Guillemant suggests, is a multiverse in ways that we can only start to envision. Forget about the big bang. The universe is not exploding, it is expanding: space, not matter, is expanding. A revisitation of all scientific understanding needs to be addressed. Ruper Sheldrake’s “A Science Delusion” clearly explains why this is so. We are living in the foundation of mechanics and materialistic reality driven structures, that are only limits in our visualisations, and consciousness. 

For over three billion years DNA, responsible for life on our planet, seems to be directly linked to the most invisible of kingdoms we share our very existence with, fungi. 

 

Psychologist, ethno-anthropologist, HASARD4 speaker Tania Re has been working with traditional natural medicine for some time. Experiencing conscious alternating substances herself, she has started to provide micro dosage of psilocybin (a chemical compound present in certain types of fungi) to some of her patients to amazing results. One of the main characteristics of psilocybin induced phenomena is the rearticulation in the perception of time. A connection beyond the fundamentally material reality, seems to restructure thought processes and clean out negative habits such as psychological rumination.  

 

Our ancestors consumed healthy amounts of Psilocybin fungi whilst moving from one continent to the next. Scientists suggest this has played a role in our rapid brain development and size. The prefrontal cortex ignited to profuse use and recursion and set off the development of language through abstract thought.  

 

Snack on plants, however, is not enough to make for visions. We can only access certain states of consciousness through the triggering of what we already have in our body’s chemical connections. We know today that dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychotropic chemical structure active in Amazonian Ayahuasca brew, is present in the mammalian brain. Conscious expanding states seem to be the foundational requisite for all traditional shamanic and spiritual societies, from the Mongolian steppe and Nordic European shamans that have given us Santa Claus, to the Eleusinian mysteries cradle of Occidental cosmovision. Through certain experiences, time bends, bridges, and connects beyond sequential arguments.  

 

What is life? HASARD4 guest practitioner Iva Yankova, connects her practice with everyday life experience: a deep flow from the natural environment through the structure of rites of passage and ceremonies. The frequency of experience and depth of personal connection is the result of working with the subtle body, elements that relink us to the rhythms of Nature. Living life as a ritual shift allows for the transformation of deep structural impossibilities to dissolve.  

 

In frequency to disclose the abundance of life, Marion Neumann expertly provides vision, emotional stance, and understanding to make us see the unseen through her exquisite “The Mushroom Speaks.” As we see her film, we are taken back to rediscover the power of innocence as a child and  retrace the memory of our wonders. 

 

Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel laureate and foundational scientist for quantum physics, suggested life endures a “negative entropy”. Somehow our consciousness is also holding matter together.  And if matter is information, as Guillemant suggests, then we humans of the twenty-first century, are the hereditarians of a vast, mysterious, precise, symbolic and practical ocean of knowledge and information that can without a doubt take us into a new understanding of our presence in this world altogether. New narratives emerge. A future, beyond that of depressing economic, political and institutional structures, is already formed. 

 

15th century Swiss chemist, doctor, theologian and philosopher Paracelsus, proposed the virtus of a plant as its potential total form contained in a seed. The immediacy of the virtual as potential might lead us to a platonic correspondence of form to an ideal unobjectionable image. However, what might initially seem deterministic in its approach, considering “one” ideal form possible to a seed, is only a superficial and perhaps static way of reading the value of the argument. For the completed form does not escape the ordinance of time in a particular context: that virtual significance suffers the same free will as do we; as much as in its nature in the manner of possible outcomes, and certainly subjected to chance. In other words, if a plant could think then it’s “virtus” or potential would be intrinsically tied to thought.  We become what we think, as the Upanishads suggest. 

 

Our bodies are filled with mysteries. We are the living understanding of the alchemical correspondence: as above, so below, as below, so above. There is a tree of life flowing through our spine, and center to it all, there is the heart. Let us not mistake our heart for a simple pumping machine. Let us perhaps move closer to what tantric yoga suggests is the key that unlocks the significance of what we call reality. The heart hosts the divine order that manifests our forms. 

As Guillemant suggests: “The function of the present time is not to create reality (already created) but to shape our common future through the cumulative effect of all our consciousnesses. This choice is difficult because our free will is generally illusory: authentic freedom requires a mental deconditioning and a spiritual awakening. (…) Love (in the sense of self-giving) is the essence of this movement in inner space (7d?), like gravitation in outer space (3d): we attract and are attracted by what we love.” 

 

As Javary notes at length in his work: life is relational, and chance has it happens as a result of that which wants to be together. Love, it seems after all, is the key to our existence. 

 

Felix Bachmann Quadros 

Fribourg  06.03.2023