Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions
What is the Good Life?
Postponing the urge to answer this question, we discover the other questions that might be hiding within. Responding to a question with many other questions, we follow connecting branches and twigs that can help us draw a collective map of were we stand, and of how our different concerns might actually be related.
Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions is a workshop that attempts at creating space for a collaborative telling of the overwhelming complexity of the world we live in. It is about finding ways to connect the questions that are too big to deal with at the level of our daily sense of agency with the questions that we can handle, but which are so small they easily give the impression of being irrelevant; the questions that are so far away that they are difficult to really connect with, with the questions that are so close that we might forget they were even ever questions.
Our ecological predicament is the subject of dominant narratives that cultivate toxic collective imaginaries. With ‘The Great Reset’, the ‘world leaders’ of the World Economic Forum responded to the COVID and the many other global crises with what is less a reset than a radical acceleration of an already ongoing process: the establishment of total control over human and non-human life through the hyper-management of resources and technological innovation. In the face of this headlong rush, before taking action, it might be wise to develop other means of orientation so as not to feed this machine even further.
For example, by drawing up a list of the questions that we don’t ask ourselves enough, the ‘Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions’: what if we tried to address these questions from the experience and wisdom that already exists among us at the very moment, instead of systematically referring to expert knowledge? There’s of course the risk of facing incapacity to answer, but that incapacity could also well be a way off the motorway of the dominant worldviews.
This workshop stems from a project originally developed in 2020 under the name The Good Life as a month-long event in Luzern, Switzerland, which was ultimately cancelled because of COVID restrictions. The event was to happen at the same time as a World Economic Forum’s special meeting taking place a few kilometers away, atop a mountainpeak, just on the other side of the lake. Articulated around the “Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions” the programm was to include any contribution by local collectives, organisations or individuals whose work, activity or practice tackled in a way or another one or several of the hundred questions on the nFeAQ list. Together, all contributions and exchanges were to weave a bottom-up narrative made of social, political, economic and collective practices, aesthetic, poetic and sensual work, scientific research and personal experiences, as a situated alternative to the alienated worldview of the global rich.
conception: Christophe Meierhans, 2020
with the collaboration of: Jens Burde, Daniela Weinmann, Vera Brunschwiler
production: Luzerner Theater, La Bellonne
thanks to: Sandra Küpper, Irina Müller
occurences:
2020 — Luzerner Theater (covid-reduced installation), Luzern
2021 — 10Days4ideas, La Bellonne | Bruxelles
2025 — Bastard Festival, Rosendal Theater, Trondheim