Basically

Basically is an ongoing live project. It utilizes the exhibition space as a hybrid production space and playground; a context to practice and perform within. Basically is structured as a choreographic game in which four performers hold the rules of the game constant, incorporating visitors in visible and invisible ways. The work is governed by the formal rules as well as by the subjective interpretations that occur in interactions with and between the participating artists and visitors. The creation and re-creation of the environment is central in Basically. Each presentation is one moment in a long-term long-form megawork. Visitors are invited to experience how the works’ characters write the world of Basically into existence – and to become a part of this open-world, role playing game.

Jagudajev developed ‘re-schooling’ – a prefigurative practice inspired by playful ways students subvert the educational system. Some of the most creative and heartfelt acts of our early education, like self-organized play, flirting, or passing notes, were extra-curricular yet located within the institution. In Basically, the exhibition space as architecture and institution, contains this world in which other things are happening: eating and sharing conversations, making clothes and music, and surreptitiously playing a game.

A very important aspect of Basically is the continuous, ever-evolving nature of it. Every new element, such as the city and venue in which it is taking place, the team—their interests and skill, what is installed in the space, it all adds to and simultaneously remakes the constellation. The visitors also become a part of this expanding and contracting ecosystem which means that they experience different aspects of the work depending on when they arrive in the space.

Basically proposes something messy and accessible that envelopes the visitor, something uncontrollable and spontaneous that is open to contamination. With choreography Jagudajev offers another way of orienting ourselves, a different way of relating to art, not as something that we are separate from but as an integrative, prefigurative practice that offers contamination through unexpected encounters.

Listen to the Basically album on Spotify. Released in 2022, it was featured on Salt Peanuts and Christina Vantzou’s Boomkat 2021, with Basically as her #7 pick of the year.

Watch a video of Basically in Shedhalle Zürich here.

Collaborators: The Class of the 21st Century (see credits below)