Hope for the Best- Prepare for the Worst is a performative training designed to explore the possibilities of co-existence and adaptability in the face of imagined and imminent futures. Through collective choreography, Viktorija Ilioska invites participants to engage in haptic thinking, using hand gestures, meditative exercises, and shared movement to create a space for reflection and exploration. The work encourages the audience to envision new ways of being together, promoting a slow yet active engagement in collective transformation.

Commissioned by Suns and Stars, this piece emerged from a one-month residency in Amsterdam, where Ilioska engaged in an extensive exploration of the Marineterrein area. The site-specific research inspired this evolving project, which not only considers the immediate context but also reflects on larger questions about the future.

Hope for the Best- Prepare for the Worst is not a static piece, but an ongoing investigation that will eventually take shape as a stage performance. It is framed as a performative training for the world to come, driven by the central question: What should we train as a collective body for the future ahead?

“I am particularly interested in initiating a collective process of reflection through movement. By engaging with hand gestures, score based body exercise and meditative practices, I want to create a space where we can confront the challenges of the future together, opening up new possibilities for shared existence,” Ilioska explains.

This evolving work serves as both a training ground and a reflection on how our bodies and movements can adapt and respond to the complex realities of the world we are entering. Through this process, Ilioska offers a critical and poetic vision of how we can navigate the unknown, together.

The three-day symposium ‘We don’t want to be stars (but parts of constellations) developed by Suns and Stars revolves around the question: How do we create a meeting place for practicing and honing the art of mutually dependent coexistence? The symposium is, so to say, a cooperative gathering in which the common is not defined in terms of identity, but as the work of connection and the alliance between (local) communities, human and nonhuman, that act, build, and create in common. As such, the symposium can be understood as an ongoing experiment in which we engage in a kind of improvised study by “talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering” and passing time together. All while eating collectively prepared meals. The idea of shared giving-and-receiving offers an opportunity to explore a form of communal being in which we can become elusive builders of an unconditional meeting place.

With contributions of: Alaa Abu Asad, Anastasija Pandilovska, Doe Maar Niet, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Elke Uitentuis, Fani Konstantinidou, Femke Ravensbergen, Ivana Vaseva, Lianne van Roekel, Margit Säde, Marjoca de Greef, Mohamed Alnoor Hedjaab, Natalia Papaeva, Stefano Harney, Sojung Jun, Viktorija Ilioska, and We Sell Reality.

Suns and Stars are a nomadic art space and a platform for relational art practices and open-ended research. For every new trajectory, we invite new partakers to explore and co-create. Dedicated to the simple concept that artists have in-depth knowledge of the domain they are working in, we offer artists leeway to research, explore and develop. By nourishing material and social interactions and non-prescriptive, process-based and cross-disciplinary alliances, we act as a temporary community in which humans and nonhumans, artists and audiences codetermine which tracks Suns and Stars are heading for. Suns and Stars depart from “a notion of the common that focuses not on identity but on the shared resources and tactics of collective labour.” Attracting artists, researchers, special interest groups, curators, and writers who develop their work in collaboration rather than in an autonomous space, we seek to elucidate processes within artistic practices, and how these practices can become social spaces where alternative potentialities and speculative worlds can be conceived and shaped.

“We found an inspirational partner in GROND because the collective is building a meeting place in such a way that the members of GROND are truly living ‘the art of mutually dependent coexistence’.”

Based at ‘Het Nieuwe Bajesdorp,’ the GROND collective has just finalized a fabulous space for artistic encounters and experiments; an open space to bolster collectivity, sustainability, cross-pollination and process-based practices, manifesting in a makers’ space, black box, kitchen, canteen, and two gardens. The communities of Bajesdorp and GROND are demonstrating that working and living as a collective is a way to learn how to embrace the process, to give and to take, to be flexible, to share authorship, to be creative in an organic way, to deal with conflicting interests, to be generous, and to let go. Together, they aspire toplunge into a state of learning in pursuance of a practice of solidarity. As such, GROND is a role model and a trailblazer developing new recipes for living and working together to fight alienation, which is increasingly dominant in our society. GROND is not only giving space to the symposium; members of the GROND community are part of the program as well with workshops, cooking and live performances.