About scores
It can be enacted, ignored, misread, or transformed.
A score can take many forms: written, spoken, drawn, painted, analogue, digital, filmed, recorded. It can be simple or complex, poetic or practical. What matters is that it offers a blueprint for something that can be activated by others.
Scores are closely connected to Happenings, the artistic experiments of the 1950s and 1960s that sought to blur the distinction between art and life. Coined by Allan Kaprow in 1959, the term “Happening” describes events grounded in participation, improvisation, and ephemerality. Unlike theater, a Happening does not aim for repetition or stable form. It unfolds as a situation rather than a spectacle.
From this lineage, the score emerges as a trigger for attention and action. It often works with what is simple, everyday, and unexpected. It may carry humor. It may appear vague, minimal, or even absurd. But precisely through this openness, it creates space: for interpretation, for transformation, for difference to enter.
Scores are not fixed objects but carriers of evolving ideas, always in flux. Their very impossibility to perform or reenact is what can give them poetic force.
And perhaps this matters especially now. As our everyday is shaped by invisible systems, abstract structures, and increasing complexity, the score offers another orientation: to foster the simple, the collective in order to evoke desire for action.
Chance is central: by remaining open, scores allow other gazes, other sensibilities, to translate words, symbols, or colors into action.
Language is your tool: a play between ambiguity and clear instructions. Everything can become a score.
Space is a collaborator: the environment in which a score is read / created / activated shapes its meaning. It reveals the situation, the aesthetic, the boundary, the collective, and the individual of that specific moment in time.
Further Resources:
> The Scores Project
> The Fluxus Performance Workbook
> Archives Ecart