ARCHIVES 2013 / Europia Geopolitical Fable

Europia was published by Un Thé chez les fous. The students of the ERAC imagined with Gérard Watkins a collective questioning process on today's Europe. Starting with its authors – plastic artists, poets, musician, and politicians –, its popular mythology, its historical traumas and its divergent identities. A round-trip between a “working table”, re-enactments, performances and improvisations. The young actors went in pairs to seven European cities of their choice, most of them ports, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, Gdansk, Riga, Bucharest and Athens. Couch-surfing or housed with the help of partner schools, they were able to query current events and their peers, focusing their research and experiences on budding utopias. They then jotted down notes on their stay in a dramatized travel log, including diverse materials: interviews, writings, and sound ambiances. These notebooks served as an inspiration for Gérard Watkins whom the students regularly got together with to enrich his writing and staging work, from its beginnings through its execution with the show Europia geopolitical fable.