The center is the border of the border / the border of the border is the center

Freda Fiala (2023 ADAM Observer)

This text wishes to acknowledge that the Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), as a venue in Taipei City, is located on the indigenous territory of the Ketagalan people, and to point out its geographical location on the former bed of the Keelung River. It was on this land that the 7^th edition of ADAM was held in August 2023, finally also welcoming international guests back to post-pandemic Taiwan. Flowing alongside the Taipei Arts Festival with its curatorial theme of 'Dancing Ecosystems', the ADAM gathering nested in the higher floors, in the studio spaces. TPAC’s rehearsal spaces, with their wave-shaped windows, open onto a panoramic view of the city under the dizzying Taipei summer sun. The liminality of this daylight condition suggests how creation processes relate to geographies and local knowledge structures, drawing a kinetic horizon to rethink the contemporary condition of the island as a starting point for making works. The rehearsal and production spaces form the spinal cord, the center, a cube to which the auditoriums of three theaters are attached on the sides. Unlike Taiwan's representational theatre buildings of the past, "Beiyi" (TPAC’s Chinese nickname) suggests an architectural inversion of the logics of production to depart from actual artistic practices and needs. This place manifests itself as a realization of the utopian designs of twentieth-century artists. Drawing from concepts such as Walter Gropius’ "Totaltheater", it reverts the logics of Western-centered cultural infrastructure in a twenty-first century Asian context, provoking the notion of spectatorship by seducing it to reflect on its relationship to the acts of witnessing and also, producing. 
 

Having spent its early years migrating between different urban venues, ADAM's program is now presented in TPAC, but has only seemingly settled down. With a vision of "performing cultural infrastructures" (River Lin), it seeks to explore and challenge the potential of an intra-regional arts ecosystem by bringing together professionals from diverse cultural backgrounds and developing programs that further intersect visual and performing arts practices. In addition to ADAM, several of this year's Taipei Arts Festival productions have also embraced the cross-disciplinary concept of "live exhibition," forming an experimental heterotopianism to expand the equation of TPAC's space in relation to growing new social dramaturgies.
 

Attempting to recalibrate the transcultural potentials of TPAC's large institutional framework in contemporary Taiwan, ADAM's international gathering of artists, curators, and other professionals re-roots contemporary performance in an ongoing process of studying, learning, and collectively imagining the East- and Southeast Asian region. The Artist Lab sharing opened the annual gathering. "Watering Intimacy”, co-curated by Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) and Chen Chen presented insights into the working processes of the invited artists Sorour Darabi, Gok-Lim Finch, Daniel Hellmann, Hsieh Chieh-Ting, Ihot Sinlay Cihek, Victor Kinjo, Quỳnh Lâm, Nanako Matusumoto, Prumsodun Ok, Yuka Seki, Natasha Tontey, and Louie Zalk-Neale. The afternoon series of their presentations expressed both the breadth and the complex intersections of their individual approaches. Together with material traces from their workshop process, the artists transformed TPAC's rehearsal studio into a temporary research and exhibition space, drawing attention to the integration of their singular artistic trajectories in light of their cultural interactions with Taiwanese hospitality and customs, exploring rituals, conflicting meanings, and value systems in relation to 'queer ecology' practices. To name a few, Hsieh Chieh-Ting and Victor Kinjo addressed ways of meeting and getting to know each other, exploring geographies of drawing and sound to integrate views from their Taiwanese and Brazilian-Okinawan cultural backgrounds. Cambodian Khmer dancer and teacher Prumsodun Ok decided to collaborate with local dancer Li Chieh, whom he first met at TPAC's 2019 Camping Asia program. Exploring the process of choreographing one-on-one with someone trained in a different movement tradition, their collaboration was an exemplary staging of the possibilities of reconnecting through Taiwan's recently established regional networks. In her courageously and skillfully furious lecture performance, Ihot Sinlay Cihek of the Pangcah descent from the Tafalong and Ci Sanasay tribes in Hualien pondered the systemic frustrations faced by contemporary indigenous women navigating the complexities of both tribal and urban life, as well as the interplay between Pangcah tradition and modernity. Swiss intersectional activist Daniel Hellmann (as Soya the Cow) instead created a pledge for institutions, as they urged cultural venues to serve only plant-based options and acknowledge that ecology-focused artistic practices must relate to critical animal welfare issues. They also encouraged audience members to participate in greenwashing their skin in a humorous yet absurd way. Focusing on their time spent in Taiwan, the collaboration formed between Japanese performance artists Nanako Matusumoto and Yuka Seki employed the experience of the ADAM artists' field trip to Taitung on Taiwan's Pacific East coast as an immediate frame of reference, processing the encounter with the island's subtropical nature and humorously redrawing a map of bug bites on their skin.
 

In addition to the ADAM’s Artist Lab sharing, ADAM’s Kitchen is a work-in-progress presentation format that allows artists to showcase projects that are still in development, especially those that involve cross-cultural exchange. This year, Leu Wijee, Mio Ishida and Hung Wei-Ling opened the Kitchen format with Museum II: Ridden, a ritual choreography first presented at last year's Indonesia Dance Festival (IDF) that explores ancestral consciousness in dealing with natural disasters as one of humanity's prominent collective memories. The collaboration A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe by Rikey Tenn and Wu Chi-Yu experimented with the format of lecture-performance format to discuss colonial travel reports in the context of the Global South. Artists Scarlet Yu Mei Wah, Tung I-Fen and Fan Xiang-Jun addressed the notoriously underrepresented theme of motherhood in artistic practice. ADAM’s Assembly consisted of two panels and a roundtable discussion on the topics of ecosystem, queering and the Global South, rounding out the intense programme.
 

By engaging with embodied knowledge, knowledge that is implicit and expressed through the body and bodily (inter)action, ADAM continues to question the role of the artist body in its social and material environment. Its emphasis on the connection to the land echoes a pervasive theme of Taiwan’s contemporary art since the 1990s, while also taking it a step further, by connecting to a global discourse on art and ecology and linking it to a residency program. Rather than simply 'implanting' artists' practices in different contexts, its format provides a space for heterogeneous practices and entangled multiplicities. Indeed, TPAC as a venue and ADAM as a program suggest that we understand the notion of "center" through the methods of ecology and infrastructure, that we imagine the "center" as a place of transmission and translation, of fostering artist relationships through long-term platforming – it is a thought-provoking proposal, articulated as a visionary invitation.

Photo by Grace Lin