Radical Tenderness
A process
An encounter
A performance
A manifesto.
The project explores the concept of "radical tenderness" through a laboratory of performing arts, aimed at young people, with the purpose of creating connections between themes, urgencies and issues that emerge from the group itself in the different contexts and territories of circulation.
How do you practice tenderness?
Where is tenderness inhabited?
What is radical tenderness?
Radical
"radicalis" (Latin) relating or pertaining to the term "root" or "origin". In activist contexts the word is used to describe actions or attitudes that demand fundamental changes or changes from the „roots".
Tenderness
A quality, state or condition of being tender, gentle, affectionate. A term mostly associated with intimate contexts, in romantic or sexual relationships, to describe a certain quality of interacting with each other, through care, affection and mutual respect. "Tenderness" can also be understood as a verb, an action, which describes a concrete (executive) act by a subject with the intention of doing good to another subject. This action can involve a movement, a gesture, a look...
We live in an increasingly noisy and chaotic reality, where time is scarce resource. We lack time for socialising, for listening to each other, for individual and collective care.
We live in an increasingly noisy and chaotic reality, where time is scarce resource. We lack time for socialising, for listening to each other, for individual and collective care.
How can we create a practice that seeks to establish common spaces and time to be, to listen, to look at the world with caring eyes, to question and transform our social interactions based on affection, care and mutual respect?
What happens if we experiment with practices of tenderness as a collective action, as a possibility for coexistence and co-creation? Is it possible to experience tenderness collectively, from our own bodies and skin, from what is most personal and intimate? Is it possible to build other ways of interacting, that oppose the reality we're living?
What if we started to find ways to "radicalize" our expressions of tenderness? Is it possible to create an act of protest and resistance through attentive listening and kindness?
Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking
that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.
The tender narrator, Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel prize for Literature, 2019