External Promises is a simultaneous urban and astral visit through different cities.
External Promises — Fortune guide for disaffected places addresses the issue of disaffectec space, as a way of rethinking intimate space (assigned space, sacred space or conquered space) from a post-confinement perspective by applying it to the affective and political relationship to public space.
What is the place for affect in the public/political sphere – online or in physical space – when public space is disaffected from its living forms, i.e. when an external force deprives us collectively and individually of its access?
An uninhabited or unused urban space presents itself as disaffected (rugged or wasteland, deserted or forbidden public space) when the marks of affection (in the sense of action and movement that carries the soul towards the other), the traces that imprint themselves in its fort are removed from it and the forms of affective expression (political and intimate) are prevented.
External Promises — Fortune guide for disaffected places thus questions the idea of affective space — affected and disaffected; sensitive and technological — in both material and immaterial space, considering virtuality as a spectrum and a prism for deploying one’s affective charge (feeling, empathy, impulse, desire) in a channelled and ordered space.
The performance is activated according to two different modes: an indirect interview with the users of the city in the form of a call for testimony and a collection of stories (public display mentioning the performance’s telephone number); a performance guided by telephone, in the form of a conversation and a discussion group Signal that can be consulted ubiquitously.
External Promises — Fortune guide for disaffected places situates the intangibility that resides at the edge between the intimate and the external: projecting from the self to the outside, from the outside to the self; echoing the technology of visualization in militant neo-pagan practices as deployed by the Wican feminist writer Starhawk or echoing the perfor- mative actions of Women’s Pentagon Action; visualization is done collectively, through interference and the exchange of visual signs.
The performance is situated between online conversation and assigned performance, between meditative stroll and lucid dreaming, between urban visit and astral travel. A transitional object, the smartphone becomes a space for mental projection as the bodies of the performers roam the city; the mind dissociates itself from the physical body to live an autonomous existence and explore in an augmented way — from the subjectivity of the group — the surrounding reality.
