“When this animal was discovered in the late 18th century, a skin was sent to Britain for examination by the scientific community. At first, scientists were convinced that the at first sight bizarre set of physical features must have been a fake, produced by some embalming process. Instead, it was the platypus”. (Wikipedia)

As the story found in wikipedia (if the story is real or not is not relevant), the Platypus is a weird  impossible composition which is actually possible. The Platypus is an act of making the impossible possible by a jump of imagination.

How to become a platypus is an environment with several stations. Each person enters the space following a score of directions that is different for each participant, and joins a constantly different constellation of people engaged in different ways in a plausible negotiation of meanings.

The stations, eleven at the moment, have been named, with great pleasure in naming, with titles that recall the dynamic of knowledge connected to each of these practices: fictio magistralis, stele di rosetta(lost in translation), scac-casual (chess by chance), frattempo (meantime), non è mai troppo tardi (never too late), sub-poteri (sub powers), innumerevolità (uncountability), a fin di bene (for good’s sake), reception.

Attention is displaced and surprised; what we consider our knowledge loses balance, leaving room for intuitions or knowledge that we did not believe to be such. The environment that is created is a kind of training to free a part of one’s knowledge from having a utility. The criteria that place one knowledge at the centre and the others at the margins fall through. In the vertigo of not knowing, possibilities open up and worlds are created: even the platypus becomes possible.

In between the sequence of stations, some collective moments of unusual pauses are placed. The conclusion of the performance is yet another task for the group to collectively create a possible ending. The format is built in a way that the stations/exercises can change in number and quality, allowing the project to keep the research open in the encounter with local groups. Furthermore the criteria that define what can be a ‘technique to become a platypus’  (a situation that challenges the concept of knowledge) are so precise and free at the same time that the flow of creation of new exercises is ongoing.