“Inertia for everyone” or “Inertia of the hidden knowledge” or “Hidden knowledge for dummies” or “Inertia”.

Since the beginning of 2010, following the proposal of Eduard Gabia, we started to meet (almost every day), from Monday to Friday, between 3 and 7 o’clock p.m., in the Studio 1 of the National Center for Dance, Bucharest (during these meetings I only learned one dance movement but I started to play the base guitar). Our research theme became (was from the beginning) the hidden knowledge and inertia and the development of practices that would generate this knowledge. We will now try to define hidden knowledge (and inertia). We might not succeed but at least we’ll try.

Inertia is a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force/an object’s resistance to change in its state of movement or repose.

As for hidden knowledge, Alfred Jarry defined a (pseudo)science he invented as “pataphysics”, “the science of imaginary solutions , which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments". In order to find this mysterious knowledge, we must accept the illusion of knowledge. Like Nietzsche said in “The Gay Science”, “I was awaken, all of a sudden, in the midst of this dream, but only to be aware that I am dreaming and that I must continue dreaming, otherwise I would disappear...What is “appearance” for me now? For sure, not the opposite of essence. Appearance is, for me, something alive and effective...among all these dreamers, I too, the “knower”, I am dancing my dance”. I don’t like the use of quotes for the presentation texts/statements, “I like cats with stripes” –Albert Einstein, seems just as valid to me. I think it’s sometimes ok to use quotes, it all comes down to how relevant they are and also, not everything should rely on the quotes.

In order to find the hidden knowledge you must accept the illusion of knowledge.

“Looking for the hidden knowledge”, in itself, is somehow absurd. I like to think of the hidden knowledge as something that reveals itself or can reveal itself at any moment, following any kind of action. Maybe it’s more like a state of mind. Any action produces knowledge or has the potential to produce knowledge.

We always thought about how we could define this “hidden knowledge”, what are the ways/ mechanisms that would help produce it? We don’t have a common answer so we would like to invite you to think about that as well.

This long period of time we spent in the Studio 1 of the National Center for Dance could be framed as a social experiment. The results are difficult to quantify and to shape into a performance. I think we might have accumulated a lot of potentialities and their latent state became more and more ponderous.

We came to a point where we believe we have to re-think the present as a moment when hidden knowledge reveals itself, so we should produce actions that are not reactions, that escape the “cause and effect” logic.

During the year, there were other people visiting us, during our research, in the studio. We challenged them and/or they challenged us to discover the hidden knowledge. In April we went to the Paintbrush Factory art space in Cluj where we had a first meeting with a bigger audience and at the end of May we had another encounter with more people during the Laboratory of Singular Perspectives in the frame of the Rennes Biennale.

We then had “a premiere” at the National Center for Dance. We thought of the fact that we will always have a “premiere”, every time we meet an audience, since everything is open and things always change and shape themselves according to the place we are in an the people we meet.

The five members of Rectifier Crew are : Maria Baroncea, Vlad Basalici, Eduard Gabia, Alexandra Pirici, Jean-Lorin Sterian. The project sometimes changed its direction but we stayed the same. Or not.

The experiment continues.

The text was written by Vlad Basalici and rectified by Maria Baroncea, Jean-Lorin Sterian, Alexandra Pirici and Eduard Gabia.