“The idea was mainly to get together without having an a priori project but to start a conversation about what was important to us at this moment, about our desires, urgencies in our work on several levels: the aesthetic, political but also ethical dimensions.”
A written conversation between Antonia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi and Kerstin Schroth
How was the idea for this collaboration and the content of the piece born?
The idea was mainly to get together without having an a priori project but to start a conversation about what was important to us at this moment, about our desires, urgencies in our work on several levels: the aesthetic, political but also ethical dimensions. So it was very open as a starting-point, and all this being in the middle of the Breton countryside in the middle of the fields and ideas began to emerge blowing on desires …
Could you tell more about your interest in hybrid and queer figures in your work? In Consul and Meshie, but also in other stage works you have both created independently from each other over the years.
Our artistic projects are very different from each other, but I believe we have in common the question of hybridity, of un-stabilized identities, as Donna Haraway would say “staying with the trouble”, inhabiting the trouble.
So it is not a posture but rather a relationship to the world, a way of allowing oneself to be possessed by the multiple, the unresolved, and seeking to inhabit the spaces of transitions…
Consul and Meshie unfolds in front of our eyes over a period of 3,5 hours. What is your notion of time and space in this piece?
The duration is like a journey, with landmarks, because the score is relatively precise, but the fiction totally carries our imaginations away. So the strategy for respecting the duration of the piece is a little bell that signals the end for us, as well as for the audience.