A performative publication aiming to immerse readers in a world of social intimacy.
As in her previous work Another Hole, author and choreographer Sara Gebran adopts a speculative-writing style so as to avoid categorization. A writing that appropriates everything that goes on in front of her, from films, news, daily pandemic or post pandemic stressed jokes, philosophy, to books on art, or by artists, sex and desires, performances, YouTube, Instagram, and soap operas. Quantum Society figures a delirious and hallucinatory theoretical poetics that prompts access to a new world without representation Sara Gebran calls: NOTHING, BIG EMPTY, BIG NOTHING, where everything we know will not appear as separated in the future. Comprised of 550 micro-chapters, Quantum Society journeys through an overabundance of critical topics, personal reflections, political rants, song lyrics, lists, capturing contemporary global life as one of loneliness as well as critical hope and courage to demand an ecstasy of intimacy. Sara Gebran uses the page as a stage for choreographic and dancing practices, and as a public space where readers meet (in quantic time) to experience shared imaginaries. Readers are treated as a collective audience, equally addressed as co-thinkers, co-writers, and performers. The instructions of emotions by colors, emotions by spacing, and how to sing this book on the frst pages gives the reader agency to put together their own matrix of feelings and imaginaries. The uncanny intimacy she develops is a tool and a concept she calls Social Intimacy, a part of her investigation on how to achieve, together, a more open, inclusive and solidary society, a QUANTUM SOCIETY, which she unfolds slowly throughout the book.
Sara Gebran is a
choreographer, dancer, professor, writer and urban planner living in Copenhagen and Lisbon. Her works are situated within
performance art, exploring media such as video, photography, sound, and text mediated by the dancing body. Her publications propose self-instituting one's own knowledge independently from the validation of an institution, in the belief that citizens need to search for other systems of civil support, especially in our time when institutions and the state are unable to respond to the need of its people. Her writings are speculative, destabilizing categories, and like all her artistic works, they investigate how power works. Her interest in movements lead her to the study of Quantum Physic, from which she developed her latest Theory for a Quantum Society, Quantic Dance, Social Intimacy and Theory of the Gap.
