SpaceTime Performance — meeting in Lublin

An open score and the development of STP principles

The notes archive distinguishes successive formulations of SpaceTime Performance’s principles. ‘25 Points of Performance Spacetime, or the Structure of POMOST’ is recorded as a note created on 26 October 2013. ‘26 Points of Performance Spacetime, or the Structure of STP Meetings’ is internally identified as the fifth version, dated 1 August 2020. These are neither two independent projects nor two descriptions of the same meeting, but evidence of the format’s development. The export also contains later modification timestamps, so a note’s creation date does not establish when every sentence in its preserved version was written.

The 25-point version distinguishes a meeting’s external form—individual presentations and collective actions—from its inner dimension: conscious fellow-feeling and work with a participant’s concrete experience. The later 26-point version addresses the variability of time, place and modes of documentation more extensively. It sets no single mandatory duration, instead describing a format shaped by initiators and participants in particular circumstances. The expanded point on a ‘concrete life issue’ permits a personal problem, desire or question to be encoded in an object or action. Disclosure need not therefore take the form of direct confession: what matters is opening a way for others to read it.

‘An Example of a Situational Plan for an STP Meeting’ translates this principle into spatial organisation. Objects distributed around the area of action form a movable boundary and a repertoire of expressive means. The initiating person can use them, introduce their own objects or act solely through the body. The next participant responds to the situation left by the previous one or joins while their action is still in progress. The response may be a dialogue, commentary, parody or another relationship between actions. Moving the objects changes both the visual composition and the boundary of the situation itself. This is an open relational score rather than a script prescribing a sequence of behaviour. The two preserved variants of the plan reveal revisions to the same proposal; they should not be counted as separate performances.

The note ‘Concretisation of Behaviour’ distinguishes ways of working: improvisation as spontaneous action, verification as an action thought through but not rehearsed, and composition as the presentation of an act shaped in advance. It separately considers one-off, repeated and processual actions enriched by earlier performances. This distinction makes it possible to describe STP without equating the entire practice with improvisation. The artist refers to Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies in this note, and to Grotowski, Artaud, Fluxus, Dada and Akademia Ruchu in the situational plan’s introduction. These are references he explicitly declares, not similarities attributed from outside.

These documents expand knowledge of a method developed since 2013, but a later score is not automatically an account of its use in Park Saski in 2014. Analogies with mystery rites, paratheatre and therapy belong to the project’s artistic vocabulary; they do not themselves confirm clinical efficacy or the provision of healthcare. The account of the Lublin meeting therefore distinguishes the confirmed event from STP’s broader, evolving programmatic framework.

Source: the artist’s Facebook notes archive, records 6, 4, 1, 2 and 3; editorial account based on the preserved versions.