Stephanie Pan, NGM Interview
Interview host: Shih Wei Chieh
2022.11.03
Hague, online

Can you tell us about the beginning of Modern Body Festival?
So the festival started because we have this duo ‘Center no Distractor’ where I’m playing taiko, and Stelios is doing electronics and we were fantasizing about the context in which it would make sense.

We have this duo, which is our sort of our ode to Hardcore Techno - but from our perspective, it's sort of Techno but it's not techno, it’s our version of it. And for me it's very centered around the taiko, which for me in some ways is sort of a perfect instrument, it requires a balance of physicality, of coordination, of power, of musicality, so it was a really wonderful instrument. So we were talking about the sort of performativity of the duo and fantasizing about what would be the right context to present the duo. And we had an opportunity to organize something at a place where I had my title, and we were just sitting around thinking ‘wouldn't it be cool?’ and suddenly, I think within three hours we were like ‘Oh, my God, I think we've just made a festival.

We were like, ‘we should do this’, and at the time we weren't a foundation yet, so there was only one fund we could apply to - Storm at the Hague, so we asked for as much money as we could from them to do this thing, and it was all full local, all friends. That was the first year, that was 2014. So it was in 2013 I guess that we probably started organizing it. And in that first festival we were trying to do too much with too little money. I think the thing that we loved about it was really that we suddenly understood that we were part of a very deep field and a very rich scene of artists and that we were able to put together this really cool program, just with people we knew. And the program was very balanced in representation, we realized after the fact that it was like half men, half women, it just happened. We didn't have to think about it. So we thought ‘okay, we're on to something. We're asking questions that maybe are not being asked at the time’ and we had a very beautiful response. We were building something together with people, that we could never realize by ourselves, and that was very exciting to think about.

How was the open call process?
It started out of our own project. And then we reached out around us since we were surrounded by incredibly cool artists. And then by the second edition we were working with Ping Sheng and Space Media Festival, but what we were really interested in was figuring out what the larger community was. So we had this local community, but of course, it's a deeply international field, so how far does that reach? And so we came up with this open call that kind of went viral. I don't know if it was 600 or 800 applications. I think one of the years we had 800 applications, and we went through every single one, the two of us. We looked at every single application because it was sort of a magical thing that came to us, because we didn't have to go out all over the world and look for things, they came to us, so we could sit down and see what was happening all over the world... if we want to know what's out there, if we want to know what that community is, if we want to see who we're talking to, look at those works. It's a ton of work, but I think it's a privilege.

There has to be space for wonder. There has to be space for curiosity because what's the point otherwise? Because you're going to work too hard for too little money, you're going to exhaust yourself, so you have to love it. You have to be committed to it. You have to understand what you're getting from it. So for us it was really extraordinary and pretty magical to be able to be given all of these works to look at, we don't want to be cynical about this. It's a ton of work. It took us like months. People were really upset because it took us so long to respond.

We offer the artists a fee. We offer them a platform. We offer them documentation. We offer them a context. And our demographic for our call was also kind of crazy, I think it was close to 60 % women who would apply, and lots of mixed groups, so the demographic was very different and it made us a little bit scared because we were afraid that all open calls would have these demographics and the representation would still be totally fucked up. But I don't think that's the case. I think it has a lot to do with the kind of questions we asked, and the kind of prompts you set out. I think that was something that was really important to us. It made us feel like we were asking questions to people who don't feel like they're being spoken to all time.

We haven't done a biennial since 2018, since Covid hit. So we did a third edition in 2018, where we had another open call and hundreds of applications. So we've done 3 biennial editions and the format changed every single time. The first time it was a 17 hour event, the second time we had a sister festival in Taiwan and the event here was 13 days I think, and then the third edition with workshops, with these icebreakers, and then a sort of extended exhibition. And then the third edition we were a bit more compact, we did 5 days. I don't remember if we had workshops. And then we had a few laboratory events, so we had a symposium. We've done some smaller scale, a bit more exploratory events. So our last one was in November 2021, we organized a small scale modern body laboratory event at our studio.

Our local turnout was always not as big as we thought it should be. But I think that's a sort of naivete in our expectations of being a very young festival that goes on once every two years in a very international scene. We're sort of on the edge of sort of technology and arts performance, all of these things. And that scene here is very international. So when you do a biennial basically 70 % of your audience has moved away by the time you did the next event, so it was a lot of work. We were almost starting over every single time trying to find a public, and we had pretty quickly a pretty good international following, but those people couldn't show up. You know, until you get very big and you're getting some major acts, people are not flying in.

The Financial Aspect
It's largely public funding. Our income was pretty limited and we had some small sponsorship, we had a lot of partnerships where we would get spaces for free or get spaces for a discount. Almost no corporate sponsorship.

For the public funding you apply with a concept and you're expected to follow through on that concept, and there are some criteria, like they don’t fund things that are openly religious. They have some formal, very general criteria. It's not government funding. So it's like the government gives funds to a bunch of organizations that have different focuses. So we got funding from the performing arts fund for bringing in some of our artists from outside the country, some international artists, we got funding from a company which is creative Industries, so that's one of our biggest funders, Digital culture - they speak our language, they really understand what we're trying to do, they're very big supporters of us. We got funding from the local visual arts organization here in the Hague that we're both members of, and then occasionally we would get more socially oriented funding in the second edition. So it's not straight from the government, actually we've had less success, I think we didn't get funding from the city actually, which was very surprising to us, so we don't quite understand what they need or like, we didn't make a great proposal for them I guess. So for us, it's much more about this sort of public funding that is focused in particular realms of the cultural sector that understand the way we speak and think a little bit better. There's no national fund.

There's a small group of very big organs like the National opera, and the National ballet and there's a big kids festival - they get funding straight from the government. So in that respect there is no national government funding, there is these national hubs, so like creative Industries is the national fund for digital culture, architecture, anyway, there's a national fund for performing arts, there's a national fund for visual arts… but there are organizations that focus on those things, and then you have smaller funds, so we have Citywide in the Hague, a visual arts fund, there are some private funds. With private funding it's tricky for us because we're not a charity, and private funds basically always need you to be a charity so that they can't deduct their contributions.

We knew in 2018 that we weren't doing a fourth edition. I think we needed to reassess. We needed to take a step back ,and I also feel like we already said what we wanted to say, with those three editions we came sort of full circle.

The first edition was about the ‘I’, like where do I end and where does the outside begin? And what is that for people? That was sort of our first question. The second edition was about ‘I,we, they’, so what is the collective body? How do we operate in groups? What is community? And the third edition was about alien bodies, like how do we look at the other? So we felt like we'd sort of completed a kind of trilogy of research in programming, so it was sort of a moment to take a step back and see what is modern body?

And now, post-covid, what is the modern body? I think there's a collective trauma. I feel like I'm very traumatized from this period. I think it's going to take a while to unpack and then we see then.
We knew in 2018 that there would not be an edition in 2020 and all through 2020 we were patting ourselves on the back because we didn't have to make any of those choices that other people had to make, like ‘do we do it? Do we cancel it?’ We had none of this problem, so we had none of that stress. I knew in the after part of 2018 that we were not going to do a fourth edition. I mean, maybe. Maybe we'll do one eventually, but we would not do another biennial.

What is the good side of being global?
I think it's about cross-pollination, and about gaining perspective. We talked about this a lot in the suburbs when we were in Crete. We were talking about the sort of problems they have in Greece. When it comes to the art in a lot of ways, let's say it's quite trapped, so we were talking about why that is in some cases, why do we feel like it's not that trapped in the Netherlands, and I think we sort of came to the conclusion of this sort of cross-pollination - what happens in the Netherlands is that it's becoming the art scene at the very least, it’s very multicultural. There's a Dutch scene and I think you see it. It's very Dutch, when it's very insular, any place that is very insular is going to become blind to its own limitations. So when you have Cross-Pollination and you have a lot of different perspectives, you're able to look at things in lots of different ways and shine a light on things that you would otherwise take for granted or not realize. I think that's one of the things that you have in places like the Netherlands, particularly in Northern Europe where there's a pretty strong infrastructure for art, so it attracts a lot of people from lots of places, you get a kind of Cross-Pollination and cross talk. That doesn't necessarily happen in a lot of other places. So that is a richness.

I think it can come off pretty colonial if you address this sort of homogeneity in other places. And it's funny because places like the Netherlands, which have a very deep colonial history just seem to benefit from this - they go to other places, they colonize them and they take back the things they find interesting, and they enrich their own place without losing command of their land. It's a totally different situation in the colonies, like the X colonies. And the Netherlands is also a very particular place, of course, this is the home of capitalism. I mean, it's a merchant society. They have a very, very, long history of exchange. I think the notion of globalization is not nearly as new as people want to think it is. Look at the history of Taiwan, how many different hands has it changed through? Globalization is a fact, so why aren't we tapping into that in the way we exchange knowledge? I think this sort of fear of loss of identity is very tricky. It can be a trap. Because that's something they sell us to sort of keep us separated. But globalization has always existed on some levels, so why would we only look at certain perspectives because they're close to us? I'm a second generation Taiwanese American living in the Netherlands. Stelios is from Greek, how would we do a local event, that makes zero sense. I mean we're local on the ground in the sense that we do physical events and for us this sort of physical contact is very important, but we have a global outlook, we say ‘glocal’.

Finding common values in global exchanges
Friendship is a very important point. So when you're bringing people in who don't have that established relationship, it makes it much harder. For example, I don't have a bond with anybody in particular, I'm just speaking hypothetically, so then there is not this connection that exists that makes certain things easier or more possible, or more attractive. What I want to say is that I think there are some deeply cultural questions of how things operate.

I was discussing with my friend in Barcelona about getting paid physics. He was saying that he doesn't care and that you can get paid in so many other ways, and I was saying I'm too old and that I needed to see the money. Of course, it’s not like this, I love exchange, but you can't sell me exposure, you can't sell me initial investments, like I'm too far, and it was interesting to talk about it because we understood at some point that there is a deep cultural difference. The way things operate in Barcelona is like, much more sort of barter, it's much more about exchange in some ways, and relationships are built much more on this sort of sense of community, and in the Netherlands is very different. The Netherlands is very pragmatic and it runs on money. It doesn't mean that you can't have vision and it doesn't mean that you can't have principles, but it's also just very pragmatic in the sense that if you want your artist friend to do something, you'll have to give the money because we all need to pay rent. And so for me, it's also how you honor your artist or your honor your participants – it is that you don't ask them to give themselves for free. And it's a deep cultural difference. So there is this question of how do you deal with that in an international environment? How do you create a community or a context that makes it possible for everyone to operate in the way that they operate?

When there's money I think most people are happy. But in situations without much money, how do you still keep the people engaged who do run on cultures that run mostly on money? How can you create a situation where they can find their own funding, or how do you create a framework where they're able to tap into their own circuit to be able to create that possibility for themselves? I think that's a thing.

Because I went to Barcelona for a week. It had been 7 years since I had played with these people. We were playing my songs, so it was like, ‘okay, I haven't played my songs in Barcelona in a long time, it's nice to do it’, but I was there for a week and I got 250 euros, and that doesn't fly in my world. I can't do that because my time is too expensive. I can't afford to do that, in that week I could have done so many other things. I have a huge backlog. I'm like, sort of exhausted because I am never without something to do. If I'm not working for someone else, I have an enormous backlog of my own work, some of which I've already been paid for that I haven't done yet. Time is money, you know, so I can do it once in 7 years and it was cute, but it doesn't give me enough back in my reality to be able to do it on any kind of meaningful level. I can do it one-off, but it's very hard for me to invest the time that it would take to get anywhere because I just function in a different society. So how do you create a context where it's possible for everybody to operate in their way? Or every once in a while something can happen, that's like, beautiful and magical, to be taken out of your world and to be put into a different context. It has to be in balance.

Knowledge sharing is an important value in the community but you have to be able to create. It's important for sustainability that people can do that within a meaningful context. Stelios has been doing more of that lately than I have actually, because he is part of this noise network now and they have these meetings in different places, he's gone down to Athens to do something and then they had a gathering, so they're meeting each other in different cities and it's more research based. My practice is very different, so I think it would be interesting for you to talk to him in that sense, how he operates in that world, how they operate, a lot of them are affiliated with universities, academies, so they are able to get some university funding to bring people in.

So yes, knowledge sharing is wonderful and it's great to be with people you respect and care about, your friends. But most, if you're dealing with artists, everybody's freelance, so at the very least I think we have to find a way to do it where it's not costing people. Well, that's my perspective because we're living in this sort of Northern European context, where everything thrives on money. And there's room for research. I think there's a very rich scene of this sort of meeting, these sort of mobile networks that are moving around the world and they're finding very creative ways I think to be funded, because that's the thing if you're dealing with working professionals, it's work what you're asking them to do. Yes, knowledge is sharing, but they're working, and what does that mean? It means you're getting paid to do what you are doing. I think it's a question of balance, it's definitely like if it's one week a year, if it's very irregular, it's sort of nice to come together and not think about all that. It's nice to just be together and share experiences. It's just about balance.

Your priorities are changing. So when you're young, you need very little, you're very flexible, you have a lot of energy, you have less responsibilities, you can take anything, the world is your oyster. And as you start to get older, you have a lot of experience, you've done a lot of things. That’s the thing, all of this stops being so charming because we've been around for a long time. So the utopian ideals are there but you get a little worn down by this fight of your utopian ideas against a sort of corporate capitalistic reality.

I'm surprised to understand how little money I actually need to live. If you're careful, and if you know how to manage money. Like my life is kind of wonderful, I am surrounded by intelligent, talented people, it's amazing. I have amazing conversations with people all the time, I get paid to go hang out with people I love, I'm writing my album for like, the hottest shit musicians, I'm very nervous because they're so fucking good. I have such a luxurious life. If I'm in a project I never, I almost never don't want to go to work. I want to go to work, it's so cool. I have such cool work. So in that sense I don't need money to distract myself from my job. There are people who blow off steam on the weekend, they go do lots of expensive things because they spend their days doing shit they don't care about. Or not, some people also have other hobbies and stuff like this, but my point is that I don't need that much money to have a fulfilling life because my work is very fulfilling. There is, of course, the question of “where is the money?” because I don't want to be concerned. I'm too old to not know where my next meal comes from. I'm too old to not know that I can pay my rent. I don't want it. I don't have time for that stress anymore. I'm working on a larger scale and I need to be able to think freely.

It starts from the personal level, if it doesn't start from the personal, there's no point. Being part of a community is not a monolith. It's not that everybody has to behave a certain way, that is totally not what it means to build community. Building community is about surrounding yourself with people who understand you and share a vision. We do everything ourselves as well, that's why we were killing ourselves, because we don't want to ask people to do things for nothing, so we do it for nothing. We do everything ourselves. It's about wanting to be surrounded by people who understand what it means to be independent, who share a vision of what the world can be like, taking responsibility for yourself and then maybe learning from this community that you can share some responsibility, and contribute. But it's not about being selfless. Community is not about being selfless. There's no such thing as selflessness. Selfishness is at the core of the human condition. Everything we do is for ourselves. And if we can understand this, if we can accept this as the core of human nature, that everything I do, I do for me, and that means that you are not responsible for me, I am responsible for me, and you are responsible for you and I trust that you're talking to me now because you want to talk to me and you trust that I am talking to you because I want to talk to you, I'm not doing you a favor. Then we can talk in a different way, then we don't confuse ourselves with the notion of selflessness and doing things that are against
your principles or against what you want to do, because in that we have to understand selfishness on a long term scale, so it doesn't mean never doing what you don't want to, sometimes you do shit you don't want to do because you understand the long term of contributing to a community, of investing in something for a long term return, or the potential, or just trying something new to see what happens, it doesn't mean that we're only indulging in ourselves at all. It means it's about taking responsibility for yourself. That's what it means to me, of understanding this notion of self. So I think there is no conflict in being individualistic and building community. You build a community that makes sense for you and there are communities that are based on different kinds of principles. And those communities run off different principles and different priorities. And you build a community that makes sense around you, or you find yourself in a community that makes sense for you.

Do you have people that you can lean on? Do you have people that you love to be around? Maybe you have a global community.

Links in the interview

1. Modern Body Festival
2. Dezact
3. Space Media Festival--數位設計國際工作營
4. Digital Culture