RHIZOMATIC NODES 

Building on the experiences of Far North that gathers international artists in Greenland,

Far North Rhizomatic Nodes will bring emerging artists from Greenland to central Europe. The Rhizomatic Nodes serve as preparation and research sessions for artistic ideas and projects that will be further developed under the Disko Arts Festival.

FAR NORTH lays emphasis on connecting a young generation of artists from Greenland and the remaining Nordic countries with each other and international counterparts. The Rhizomatic Nodes further expand on the activities of the Diskotek Session, but bring emerging artist from Greenland and the Nordic countries into unique situations in the international field.

The countless artistic collaborations and projects that have rhizomatically sprung out from the Far North Diskotek Sessions make us confident that this mode of practice and working is the sound foundation for implementing the RHIZOMATIC NODES as a vehicle for knowledge transfer and innovative development of artistic projects.

Rhizomatic Thinking Applied to

Artistic Processes and Knowledge Transfer

The idea of the rhizome is a structural metaphor taken from biological field of botany to describe a mass of continuously growing horizontal underground stems or roots which extend lateral shoots at certain intervals in order to grow and establish connections with other shoots. A crucially important aspect of the rhizome as a metaphor for knowledge is that each and any point of the rhizome can be connected to any other at any given time. The rhizomatic viewpoint returns the concept of knowledge to its earliest roots.

Suggesting that a distributed negotiation of knowledge can allow a community of artists to legitimise the work they are doing among themselves and for each member of the group, the rhizomatic model dispenses with the need for external validation of knowledge, either by an expert or by a constructed agenda. If an absorbed bit of information is recognised as useful to the community or proves itself able to do something, it can be counted as knowledge. The community, then, has the power to create knowledge within a given context and leave that knowledge as a new node connected to the rest of the network.

Rhizomatic Nodes in Brief

• Concentrated modular nodes around specific themes central to the core scope of the Far North Network Development of new aesthetics and production modes in contemporary theatre, music theatre and performance. Each Node's thematic is determined broadly and then evolved in unison with the nucleus of artists to allow for maximum flexibility and organic unfolding of innovative thought and creative processes. Each Node is hosted by a partnering institution/organisation and paired with introductions to each organisations inner mechanics and modes of production. The Rhizomatic Nodes contain, workshops, performances, work in

progress sessions, lectures, symposiums, performance visits and interactions with the local artistic communities and host of the individual Nodes.

• Development and implementation of project ideas spurred by collaborative processes of peer knowledge transfer within Rhizomatic Nodes is produced separately within the collaborative production network for the Disko Arts Festival and Far North Network.