Three new films from the series How We Behave commissioned by Extra City for the group exhibition ‘Extra Citizen’ curated by Antonia Alampi and iLiana Fikianaki.

Inspired by an interview with Michel Foucault published in Vanity Fair in 1983, titled ‘How We Behave’, Grant Watson’s long-term project focuses on the central question that Foucault posed in this interview – why can’t life be ‘the material for a work of art?’.

The concern here is not with ‘lifestyle’ or the link between life and art, but with what Foucault considered to be an urgent question for our time – how people work with subjectivity and invent new ways of life and relations to others, as a form of resistance. How We Behave explores the relationship between personal experience and political practice - how the ‘care of the self’ can be seen as a precondition for the way we relate to others and to the environment. It looks for experimental life patterns, those interested in generating new social structures, investing in self-education, political consciousness, and new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality.

Each interview has been carried out in the same way with a group of three interviewers, a stenographer and the interviewee. A series of questions concerning details of the subject’s life produced observations on behaviours and habits, exercises and techniques, emotional processes, economic circumstance, ethical dilemmas and politics. Each interview is transcribed and edited before a selection of transcriptions made and developed further. These texts were then used as the basis for a second filmed interview in which participants were asked to revisit the first interview in a part-scripted, part-improvised presentation for the camera.

These three films feature the feminist project Just for the Record, the artist Anne – Mie van Kerckhoven and Elke van Campenhout co-founder of The Monestry.