Orion Maxted Words

Orion Maxted and Nestor Topchy at DiverseWorks

Here is the statement I wrote in the lead-up to the festival, part of which I read out at the seminar we gave:
“The Paris ’68 slogan: ‘Take your dreams for Reality’ can be taken as a practical methodology. Brain-washing, another related example, first requires breaking-down the subject’s psychic-integrity; their information processing and concomitant social values.

Orion Maxted and Nestor Topchy at DiverseWorks

Art can be a third example, an alternative way of achieving some practical change. Through performance, my work takes a sideways look at language and cognition. the method is to unlock, jolt, or re-examine our ‘psychic-integrity’. I mean to find gaps – to show that reality is not fixed, but porous, fragile and reprogrammable. To examine what we take for granted – These are all forms of intellectual violence. Which is the first aim of my work.
Right now society is in the middle of exactly such a reprogramming phase. Example: God is ‘sort of’ dead; machines are ‘sort of’ alive; and we are somewhere between the two. The second aim of our work ought to be constructive: nothing less than helping to describe the language with which the world is programmed – and to reprogramme the world. This language will be music.
Orion Maxted (b. 1977) is a performance artist and curator based in Berlin and London, who studied Music & Visual Art at Brighton University, England. Presenting solo works widely in Asia, Europe and America he is also member of protoPLAY and Non Grata international performance groups, and works for Testing Grounds an artist development organization operating in the UK and internationally as a curator and mentor.”

Orion Maxted and Nestor Topchy at DiverseWorks

Orion Maxted Website