I don’t expect, nor need, the audience to understand this from viewing, but as a central concept, I would like to make space to unpack my use of these terms as they are fundamental to my conceptual practice.
‘Fulfilment’
‘Fulfilment’ is at the centre of my enquiry, it is a concern present in my past three years of work. I have chosen to use the word ‘fulfilment’ over content or happiness or satisfied, as I believe its subjectivity and ambiguity serves the questions I am exploring. I think someone can be fulfilled and not happy; someone can be satisfied but not fulfilled; and while content is a wellness buzzword right now, I think you can train yourself to be content, as mindfulness teaches, but you cannot train yourself to be fulfilled.
When considering ‘fulfilment’ it is clarifying and confusing to consider its psychological and bodily manifestation/situation/result. Personally, I don’t believe it to be confined to either domain whereas we might consider happiness to be psychological; satisfied connotes relief, perhaps from hunger, bodily (?); content, psychological, but also, allegedly, a choice.
I also have chosen to express the inconsistent notion of success, completeness, or achievement, through ‘fulfilment’. My definition of ‘fulfilment’ could be different from yours, could be different from the capitalist projection of ‘fulfilment’, and is likely different from what I considered to be ‘fulfilment’ a few years ago, and maybe a few years from now. Because of this inconsistency, the idea of seemingly endless preparation depicted in the futile repetition of the movement doubles the audience’s ambiguity surrounding what the performers are getting ready for, by questioning whether we even know ourselves.
‘Future- Orientation’ or ‘Future-Fixation’
‘Future-orientation’ is a term I have made up as an affect-based descriptor of the propagated mindset of neoliberalist society. Moving from institution to institution, job to job, rite of passage to rite of passage, social ranking to social ranking. with each performative/transformative phase of life, there is little room left for the present moment, and the past becomes deficient the moment it is no longer the future, each phase there is something ‘better’ to prepare for in the future.
