Atten-dances: Looking up from what one’s doing – exploring the possibility of trust in the digital age through relational practices

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

Our working group investigates how trust is formed in an age of digital reproduction and media saturation, where distinctions between real and fake have collapsed – not because everything is false, but because the very criteria of verification has lost authority. As narrative reliability dissolves, so too does the foundation for trust. This crisis feels increasingly urgent today, as authoritarian systems grow stronger by exploiting confusion and offering a false sense of belonging – often at the cost of excluding those who do not fit within it. We approach the theatrical space and live performance as a crucial arena to engage with this crisis – not as a problem to be resolved, but as a lived condition, a defining feature of contemporary perception. In a world where every image, sound, and statement can be endlessly edited, ambiguity arises from a hidden dependency: the fact that perception itself depends on the agency of the user/consumer. While digital platforms often attempt to conceal this reliance, the theatrical encounter possesses the power to make it visible. We are interested in how ambiguity can become a generative force for building diverse communities rather than acting as an agent of separation; a force that fosters relational awareness and shared responsibility by allowing the audience to experience how the effects of a performance depend on their presence. Our project emphasizes how awareness of one’s role – as a bearer of attention – is not only a private experience but a relational one, shaping the dynamics of communities and public life. In this way, performance itself becomes a rehearsal for agency: a chance to renegotiate how we relate to structures of power, and how we might reclaim trust as a collective, lived practice, which is not assumed, but rehearsed together through shared encounters with a reality that is co-created, relational, and shaped by the multiplicity of its participants.