It is very important to ask questions, and it is nonetheless important to repeat them over and over again, no matter how trite they seem. Answers may alter with time. They may be and, most likely, will be different depending on the context, cultural, and social environment, as well as individual mood, age, gender, or character of the respondent. Even a quantitative analysis of the answers can hardly provide any satisfactory result. The answers allow one to determine the range of diverse interests and points of view, and not to find out who is right or wrong, who knows more, or “who knows how to.” Such an understanding of the very essence of asking questions frees participants from having to adjust the answers to the expectations of the questioner and allows them to be sincere and effective in identifying and solving problems.

Any question posed commands a promise of an answer. The promise lies at the heart of this wondrous language construct and guarantees its implementation. In this regard, an unanswered question is no less interesting, since, similar to an unfulfilled promise, such a question can have a lasting effect. It is necessary to ask questions, even if it is ‘futile’.

Questions are also fraught with position and content. A few years ago I gave a lecture on the art of performance for students of the School of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. The lecture consisted entirely of questions, without a single affirmative sentence. As then, in an attempt to explain such a fluid and free phenomenon in art as performance, it seemed more correct to formulate the problematics of the STATUS project by the means of questions.

The question cards presented here are the result of a three-day meeting in Gothenburg in November 2017, at which Belarusian and Swedish colleagues developed the STATUS project. Notes of discussions, suggestions, and issues raised, were reworked into a card set of questions which we subsequently used as a warm-up game at a seminar in Brest in September 2018. Drawings on these cards are partly the documentation of the Gothenburg meeting, partly the collages of motives from my photos.

There are no strict rules in this card game so you can create them yourselves.