PERFORMANCE PROGRAM

The Cynics Republic proposes to approach the resources of the MSN and Kontakt Collection from the perspective of a repertoire of immemorial gestures. Works will be activated every weekend by artists and performers, on schedule or in an untimely manner according to a weekly theme:

For the cynic, the systematic practice of dishonor is invaluable, arming him with resistance to others’ opinions, beliefs, and traditions. To hold out one’s hand, a gesture infamously tied with poverty, of dependence in its most unbearable form, confronts the beggar with themselves as insulted, despised, and humiliated by others. He shuns honours, he is dishonoured.

When asked why they were begging alms of a statue, the Cynic replied: To practice being turned down.

Shamelessness is expressed not solely through the exposed body, but also at the level of speech, delivered in a crude manner in the social sphere. Applying the principle of non-dissimulation, a sort of radical candor, the cynic blows up the code with which cultural life is, implicitly or explicitly, upheld.

When Crates asked hipparchia for her hand in marriage he disrobed in front of her and said, “This is the groom and these are his possessions, choose accordingly.”

To the cynic, true happiness comes from being self-sufficient, from surviving on the barest necessities, from living the life of the dog. Possessions are considered a burden to the expression of freedom. Training in hardiness of both mind and body, the cynic becomes destitute of all luxury.

When the Cynic observed a child drinking out of its clasped hands, they instantly cast away their own cup with the words, “a child has beaten me in plainness of living.”

Rhetoric is practiced in the form of overwrought speeches. The Cynics practice philosophy by being silent, by being playful, and by being the butt of the joke. 

When the Cynic was put up for sale as a slave on the market, they asked to sit down, only to be met with refusal by his merchant. in response, they said, “What does it matter, we buy fish lying on their stomach,” and then lay down like a fish.

Insistently at odds with society, the Cynics always seek a chance to disrupt the common flow. exploiting the comic resource of surprise and discontinuity, they break with convention by flipping it on its head to reveal its incongruities. 

When people laughed at the Cynic for walking backward beneath a portico, they barked back: “aren’t you ashamed to reproach me for walking backward, you who walk backward along the entire path of existence?”.