PROGRAM

sinking could be prosegue un ciclo di recenti progetti installativi in cui Mombaça lavora con un assemblaggio di materiali, tra cui luce blu, suono e tessuti di cotone, per comunicare “una pratica di percezione degli elementi”. Questa pratica si muove con – e attraverso – i corpi d’acqua: dalla laguna veneziana all’arcipelago del Mar Baltico di Stoccolma fino ai canali di Amsterdam. Per sinking could be, Mombaça estende questa indagine materiale alla linea costiera e alla fluidità della sabbia, evocando la presenza del lago Sloterplas, minato al fine di estrarre la sabbia necessaria alla costruzione delle Western Garden Cities di Amsterdam. Una duna conserva memoria dell’oceano? La sabbia ricorda l’abbraccio dell’acqua? Sommerse tra le dune di sinking could be, emergono sculture in metallo tagliate dalla pressione dell’acqua seguendo le linee disegnate dall’artista, e successivamente avvolte in tessuti di cotone. Le sculture sono state immerse nel canale adiacente alla Rijksakademie di Amsterdam per la durata di due settimane.

sinking could be continues a cycle of recent installation projects in which Mombaça works with an assembly of materials including blue light, sound, and cotton textiles to inform ‘a practice of elemental sensing.’ This practice moves with, and across, bodies of water, from the Venetian lagoon to Stockholm’s Baltic Sea archipelago and most recently, Amsterdam’s canals. For sinking could be, Mombaça extends this material enquiry to the shoreline and the fluidity of sand, evoking the presence of the Sloterplas lake, mined for sand to build Amsterdam’s Western Garden Cities. Does a dune remember the ocean; does sand recall water’s embrace? Submerged within the dunes of sinking could be are a group of metal sculptures, cut by pressurized water to the lines of the artist’s drawings and wrapped with cotton textiles. For a period of two weeks, the sculptures are submerged in the canal next to the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, where Mombaça is currently in residence.

Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Their work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennale (2016 and 2020/2021), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), and the 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Currently, they have been interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anti-colonial imagination, and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the Global Art World.

Collapse Yoga mescola lo Yoga con stati considerati “negativi” come tristezza, malattia, ansia, disperazione, preoccupazione, rinuncia, esaurimento, lutto, noia, decrepitezza, dolore, fallimento, paura e con le tracce che questi lasciano nel corpo. Gli obiettivi dello Yoga quali coordinazione, equilibrio, forza, linearità, flessibilità, allineamento, controllo, entrano in collisione con i alcuni reconditi desideri corporei quali asimmetria, scoordinazione, debolezza, rilassamento, libertà, squilibrio, abbandono, collasso. Questa mescolanza Influisce sulla normatività della forma umana. Il Collapse Yoga viene talvolta praticato accanto a edifici e monumenti intimidatori, in spazi pubblici carichi di significati, associati a rigidità culturali, etiche dannose o politiche negative. Può metterci in sintonia con ambienti naturali, sociali e personali in collasso influenzando, forse, alcuni di essi. Il rapporto che abbiamo con il nostro corpo tende a estendersi alla realtà circostante: c’è corrispondenza e reciproca influenza tra la politica del corpo e i problemi della società.

Florin Flueras (1978, Romania) considera la sua pratica recente come affect art. Il suo lavoro tocca gli ambiti della politica, della filosofia, della spiritualità, della sanità, dei media, dell’educazione, della letteratura, provando a intaccarne certezze e convenzioni. Ha collaborato con Alina Popa per creare ambienti artistici alternativi (Artworlds: Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox), e con Ion Dumitrescu (Postspectacle). In opere come Art Opening, crea uno spazio dedicato all’apertura dell’arte in termini di formato, contenuti ed estetica. In Love, Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere ha esplorato situazioni e capacità corporee che agiscono in modo “meta”, cercando possibilità per influenzare ciò che è possibile pensare, vedere e sentire in contesti diversi. In alcune sedi, le sue performance appaiono senza invito (come in Unofficial Unworks). 

Collapse Yoga mixes Yoga with possible “negative” states as sadness, illness, anxiety, hopelessness, worry, renouncement, exhaustion, grief, boredom, decrepitude, pain, failure, fear and their traces in the body. It collides Yoga’s aims for coordination, balance, strength, straightness, flexibility, alignment, control with the body’s deep desires for asymmetry, incoordination, weakness, relaxation, freedom, unbalance, abandon, collapse. It affects the normativity of the human form. Collapse Yoga is sometimes practiced next to intimidating buildings, monuments, in charged public spaces associated with cultural stiffness, harmful ethics or bad politics. It can tune our bodies with natural, social and personal collapsing environments, affecting maybe some of them. The relation with our own bodies tends to extend to the entire reality – there is a correspondence and influence between the body’s politics and society’s problems.

Florin Flueras’ work expands into spheres of politics, philosophy, spirituality, health care, media, education, literature – affecting conventions and certainties, producing performative meetings between art and its outside. In Artwork he transforms works into practices, composing a “method” in the format of somatic / spiritual methods. With Alina Popa he created alternative art environments, artworks as Artworlds (Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox). With Ion Dumitrescu he initiated Postspectacle, a practice of applying performative tools outside art, like in Candidate’s presidential campaign. In Art Opening he aims for temporary zones of possibility, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics. In Love, Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, he explores body situations and capacities that act meta, affecting what underlies the conceptual and perceptual, what is possible to think, see and feel in different contexts. In some venues they appear uninvited – Unofficial Unworks. He’s often transferring performative approaches between his writing and his works. More than visual or conceptual, Florin sees his recent practice as affect art. 

Spiraling (2021) è il nuovo film di Tarek Lakhrissi prodotto in collaborazione con la Shedhalle di Zurigo. Ispirato all’opera iconica di Félix González-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) del 1991 e girato in una galleria della Haus der Kunst, Spiraling contrasta l’architettura autoritaria dell’edificio con la potente metafora della spirale. I movimenti rotatori della ballerina Mila Furie, attivista per i diritti delle persone queer e night performer, si sovrappongono a un racconto di formazione in poesia, narrato dalla voce di Lakhrissi. Il film può essere letto come una seduzione che utilizza la poesia, l’erotismo e la cultura pop per invertire lo sguardo dominante e le relazioni di potere. (Haus der Kunst, Echoes) raccoglie testi scritti tra il 2016 e il 2022 sui temi che strutturano il lavoro dell’artista come la lotta, il corpo, il linguaggio e l’esperienza queer della minoranza.

Lakhrissi has developed Spiraling (2021), a new film co-produced in collaboration with the Shedhalle Zurich. Inspired by Félix González-Torres’s iconic work “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1991 and filmed in a gallery of the Haus der Kunst, Spiraling counters the building’s authoritarian architecture with the powerful metaphor of the spiral. The gyrating movements of dancer Mila Furie, a queer rights activist and night performer, overlap with Lakhrissi’s voice poetically recounting a coming-of-age story. The film reads like a seduction that uses poetry, eroticism, and pop culture to invert the prevailing controlling gaze and power relations. (Haus der Kunst, Echoes) 

Teatro e realtà, arte e attivismo: delle intersezioni tra questi territori si occupano i volumi ACT? della rivista “Stratagemmi”. Il terzo capitolo di questa serie è dedicato a Rabih Mroué e alla ricerca portata avanti insieme alla regista e performer Lina Majdalanie: ricorrendo a una pluralità di linguaggi e ibridando la perfomance con l’arte visuale e il dispositivo della conferenza, l’artista libanese sfrangia i confini tra spazio del pubblico e spazio della scena, tra realtà e finzione, tra drammaturgia e documento.

Theatre and reality, art and activism: the intersections between these territories are dealt with in the ACT? volumes linked to the magazine ‘Stratagemmi’. The third chapter of this series is dedicated to Rabih Mroué and the research carried out together with the director and performer Lina Majdalanie: by resorting to a plurality of languages and hybridising performance with visual art and the lecture device, the Lebanese artist fractures the boundaries between audience space and stage space, between reality and fiction, between dramaturgy and document.

Sinthujan Varatharajah è unə geografə politicə indipendente, saggista e ricercatorə con sede a Berlino. Il suo lavoro si concentra sull’apolidia, la mobilità e le geografie del potere, con particolare attenzione alle infrastrutture, alla logistica e all’architettura.
Varatharajah pubblica su Instagram (@varathas) saggi e grafici sui temi del colonialismo, della politica d’asilo e dello sfollamento. Nel 2020 ha partecipato all’11ª Biennale d’arte contemporanea di Berlino con l’installazione “how to move an arche”. Ha inoltre co-curato la serie di eventi “Dissolving Territories: Cultural Geographies of a New Eelam” a Berlino. Tra il 2017 e il 2018, Varatharajah è statə Open City Fellow e membrə dell’European Migrant Advisory Board inaugurale della Commissione europea. Il suo primo libro “An alle orte, die hinter uns liegen” è stato pubblicato da Hanser Verlag.

Sinthujan Varatharajah is an independent scholar and essayist based in Berlin. The focus of their work is statelessness, mobility and geographies of power, with a special focus on infrastructure, logistics and architecture. Varatharajah publishes essays and graphics on the topics of colonialism, asylum policy and displacement on Instagram (@varathas). In 2020, Varatharajah participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art with the installation ‘how to move an arche’. They also co-curated the event series ‘Dissolving Territories: Cultural Geographies of a New Eelam’ in Berlin. Between 2017-2018, Varatharajah was, among other things, an Open City Fellow and a Member of the European Commission’s inaugural European Migrant Advisory Board. Varatharajah’s first book “An alle orte, die hinter uns liegen” was published by Hanser Verlag.

^{ph. Robin Christian}

Pensate a come un cerchio – linee arrotondate che partono da un punto fisso – sembra continuare ad andare avanti e avanti. Questa potrebbe essere la chiave del nostro metodo.
Questo intervento riflette sull’uso dell’immaginazione nelle forme della produzione culturale “Black” e sulle possibilità di un impegno metodologico con essa. Presenterà l’immaginazione come uno strumento modulabile per pensare e realizzare contro le logiche del capitale e del confinamento.

Lola Olufemi è una scrittrice femminista nera e ricercatrice della Fondazione Stuart Hall di Londra, con sede presso il Centro per la Ricerca e l’Educazione in Arte e Media dell’Università di Westminster. Il suo lavoro si concentra sugli usi dell’immaginario femminista e sul suo rapporto con la produzione culturale, le rivendicazioni politiche e il futuro. È autrice di Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) ed è membro di “bare minimum”, un collettivo artistico interdisciplinare anti-lavoro.

Think of how a circle, rounded lines from a fixed point, seems to keep going and going. That could be key to our method.
This intervention reflects on the uses of the imagination in forms of black cultural production and the possibilities of methodological engagement with it. It will present the imagination as a scalable tool for thinking and making against the logics of capital and confinement.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

Francesca De Rosa è una ricercatrice di Studi Letterari e Culturali (dialoghi nel sud Atlantico) ed è docente di portoghese all’Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale (UNIOR). La sua ricerca si focalizza sulle narrative coloniali, anticoloniali e postcoloniali, ponendo l’accento sulla dimensione (im)materiale della memoria nella letteratura contemporanea in Brasile, Portogallo e nei Paesi africani di lingua portoghese. Ha pubblicato articoli in tutti questi ambiti di ricerca, ma anche in visual studies e in studi di cinematografia coloniale. 

Francesca De Rosa is a Research Fellow at the University of Naples «L’Orientale» on Cultural and Literary studies (dialogues in the South Atlantic) and she is lecturer for Portuguese (UNIOR). Her research focuses on colonial, anti- and post-colonial narratives, with a focus on (im)material dimension of memory in contemporary literature from Brazil, Portugal and African Lusophone countries. She has published articles in all these research fields and in visual and colonial cinema studies.

Yoojin Lee è un’artista Coreana di base a Londra, lavora tra performance, suono, testo, installazioni e video per incarnare modi di diventare e di conoscere attraverso la cura, la resistenza e le diverse temporalità. Il suo lavoro si confronta con le condizioni di (in)attività e (dis)produttività, in particolare pensandosi e sentendosi attraverso il sonno, la pigrizia e la lentezza. La sua performance slowth (habitats) (yet) si sviluppa dalla relazione simbiotica tra i bradipi e l’alga Trichophilus welckeri che cresce nella loro pelliccia. Il set della performance è una trama di oggetti e luci tra i quali si fanno spazio il corpo e la voce di Yoojin Lee. E ancora frequenze elettroniche, manifesti, testi, resti di parti elettriche ed elettroniche dismesse. L’artista indossa una tuta abitata da microrganismi fotosintetici -tra cui alghe e cianobatteri-, che cambia colorazione e stato di giorno in giorno. La performance vuole essere una riflessione sull’accelerazione della crescita capitalistica, attraverso pensieri e pratiche sciamanico-animista coreane. 

slowth (habitats)(yet), takes the symbiotic relationship between sloths, sloth moths and the algae Trichophilus welckeri as a point of departure. It weaves together the contacts between the body, voice, electronic frequencies, ‘banner-habitats’, text, remnants of discarded electrical and electronic parts, encountered locations, garment entangled with photosynthetic microorganisms including algae and cyanobacteria. The process of and the approach within the work are guided by Korean shamanist/animist thoughts and practices, and questions on capitalist acceleration and growth. slowth (habitats)(yet) thickens and decomposes, always in relation to the multiplicity of beings and their rhythms that it encounters. It is a habitat that is always becoming, slowly. A constellation of beings, energies and temporalities that may evade being fixed, captured and harnessed. Who might be these beings, energies and temporalities? How to imagine symbiotic tenderness beyond, but also underneath and in-between, capitalist time and speed?

Yoojin Lee works across and in-between performance, sound, text, installation and video to embody ways of becoming and knowing through care, resistance and multiple temporalities. Her work engages with conditions of (in)activity and (un)productivity; particularly by thinking/feeling through sleep, sloth and slowness. How can sleep and a sleeping body become a site of quiet resistance? How can slow, symbiotic tenderness disrupt the timescape of linear temporality? She sleeps in London.

Yoojin Lee è un’artista Coreana di base a Londra, lavora tra performance, suono, testo, installazioni e video per incarnare modi di diventare e di conoscere attraverso la cura, la resistenza e le diverse temporalità. Il suo lavoro si confronta con le condizioni di (in)attività e (dis)produttività, in particolare pensandosi e sentendosi attraverso il sonno, la pigrizia e la lentezza. La sua performance slowth (habitats) (yet) si sviluppa dalla relazione simbiotica tra i bradipi e l’alga Trichophilus welckeri che cresce nella loro pelliccia. Il set della performance è una trama di oggetti e luci tra i quali si fanno spazio il corpo e la voce di Yoojin Lee. E ancora frequenze elettroniche, manifesti, testi, resti di parti elettriche ed elettroniche dismesse. L’artista indossa una tuta abitata da microrganismi fotosintetici -tra cui alghe e cianobatteri-, che cambia colorazione e stato di giorno in giorno. La performance vuole essere una riflessione sull’accelerazione della crescita capitalistica, attraverso pensieri e pratiche sciamanico-animista coreane. 

slowth (habitats)(yet), takes the symbiotic relationship between sloths, sloth moths and the algae Trichophilus welckeri as a point of departure. It weaves together the contacts between the body, voice, electronic frequencies, ‘banner-habitats’, text, remnants of discarded electrical and electronic parts, encountered locations, garment entangled with photosynthetic microorganisms including algae and cyanobacteria. The process of and the approach within the work are guided by Korean shamanist/animist thoughts and practices, and questions on capitalist acceleration and growth. slowth (habitats)(yet) thickens and decomposes, always in relation to the multiplicity of beings and their rhythms that it encounters. It is a habitat that is always becoming, slowly. A constellation of beings, energies and temporalities that may evade being fixed, captured and harnessed. Who might be these beings, energies and temporalities? How to imagine symbiotic tenderness beyond, but also underneath and in-between, capitalist time and speed?

Yoojin Lee works across and in-between performance, sound, text, installation and video to embody ways of becoming and knowing through care, resistance and multiple temporalities. Her work engages with conditions of (in)activity and (un)productivity; particularly by thinking/feeling through sleep, sloth and slowness. How can sleep and a sleeping body become a site of quiet resistance? How can slow, symbiotic tenderness disrupt the timescape of linear temporality? She sleeps in London.

Uno scrittore nato a Beirut e una scrittrice berlinese, appassionati di storia e passato così come di fiction e futuri, mettono in scena per Live Works un loro testo originale titolato Permanent Trespass Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century. La sceneggiatura vede due figure che tessono elogi funebri, e che si trovano in una situazione di fiction in un’epoca in disfacimento non molto distante dalla nostra realtà. 
La performance denuncia le discipline storiche come “insidiosamente incomplete”, mettendo in discussione le rappresentazioni di guerra e giustizia attuali e passate. Scavando nelle storie di vari paesi, chiamano in causa gli aggressori suprematisti, le loro vittime, e la Corte penale internazionale, in un racconto che travalica ere, stati e luoghi spazio-temporali. 

In Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century), two traveling eulogists meet on a dire tableau: something like our contemporary moment or crumbling epoch. First-person monologues oscillate between formal registers towards a performance within a performance, that of a commissioned funerary text. Who or what is being mourned against a backdrop of incommensurate cruelty? Fantasized digressions hint at jumps in time toward a revolution forever deferred. 

Bassem Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Their work explores notions of historical rupture, spontaneity, and surplus, through film, performance, and sculpture, alongside essays and fiction. With an emphasis on past and present forms of struggle, they attempt to place scenes of intersubjective exchange within their world-historical frames.

Sanja Grozdanić is a writer living in Berlin. Her writing is particularly concerned with issues of memory, dispossession, and deviance, and the slippages between public and private grief, anxiety and imagination. 

Thalia Pigier è una performer e coreografa di padre francese e madre colombiana e di sé e della sua famiglia racconterà anche nella performance presentata a Live Works. Sul tema della trasmissione delle origini si potrebbe dire tanto, ma Thalia Piegier preferisce farsi domande, per esempio su come la sua cumbia non sia quella danzata dalla mamma e dalla nonna, bensì irrimediabilmente diversa, nonostante porti tracce del passato e delle persone che gliela hanno tramandata.  “The One who leaves is not gone” è una performance intima che affronta, tra gli altri, il tema delle eredità emotive, culturali, relazionali e familiari. La performance è un insieme di link e collegamenti che si accendono in maniera rizomatica nello spazio: una pianta, un costume tradizionale, degli aeroplanini di carta. L’artista cita, attraverso dei video, il performer Gino de Dominicis (volare, nel 1969), che si riprende mentre si esercita a spiccare il volo, sicuro che se avesse continuato per tutta la vita, figli e nipoti ne avrebbero raccolto l’esperienza e avrebbero potuto imparare davvero a volare.

“Following the trail of past memories, in search of the traces left by the places we’ve been, the people we’ve met. I wonder how the different sedimentations of life are deposited in us, in what form and for how long. What remains of the starting point as we move on? What is this dance that I dance?
Working with paper airplanes, using their movement as inspiration for my choreography, their landing points are checkpoints of memories around which I walk miles of real or fantasized life.
Fascinated by our capacity of always making sense out of things, I created a hyperlink dramaturgy to experiment on that, weaving unexpected associations between words, sounds and movement. Researching the questions of origins and identity, asking myself as a half-French, half-Colombian woman, what is the dance that I dance because my cumbia isn’t the cumbia my mother and grand-mother used to dance. Therefore, it’s both questioning transmission and origins that my performance The One who leaves is not gone came to life. I relate my work to Gino de Dominicis’s attempt to fly in 1969. He believed that if he trained everyday for the rest of his life and passed his training to his children and grand-children, at some point, humans would be able to fly just like we learnt how to swim.
In this autobiographical performance I ask myself what’s left from the places we’ve been and the people we’ve met.
What remains of what’s been passed on to us as we move through the world? 
What is this dance that I dance?
Embracing the topics of cultural legacy, body’s memory and the rewriting of our personal memories, The One who leaves is not gone travels in space and time, through history, intimate stories and scientific fun facts.” 

Thalia Pigier is a half-French half-Colombian performer and choreographer. She holds a master’s degree in dramaturgy from l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. After studying Stage direction in Rio de Janeiro, she started training and researching contemporary dance. In 2018, she did a research residency at ICI-CCN Montpellier where she created her first performance Journey to the underworld of research. She continued training in Brussels where she created the short piece The Girl in the bag questioning sizes and gender within a dance duo at Tictac Art center and Attempt to fly n°2.
As a performer she’s been working with David Zambrano, Marco Berrettini and Nathalie Béasse, and she will perform in Arnaud Pirault’s new creation Les Garçons Perdu.es in 2024. In 2021 she created her own dance company, Projet Total and she’s been developing it since then, (BATTEMENTS 1, 2021, Midnight’s Sun 2021, Leftovers’ Solo 2022). Choreographer of the Incubator of La Fabrique de la Danse, laureate of the Adami/Micadanses grant in 2021 and of the Danceweb scholarship in 2022, she was selected to be part of the Europe Creative project of interdisciplinary research Circus without Circus led by Theaters in Belgium, France, Denmark and Croatia until 2023.
Last winter, she was commissioned a dance performance for Mellemrum, a site specific event curated by Kitt Johnson. She created Restless with Villads Buggebang, between the stones of Thy National Park, in Denmark.

Nkisi, musicista, artista visuale e co-fondatrice di NON Worldwide – un collettivo di artisti sperimentali provenienti da tutta la diaspora africana – produce pezzi da club intensi, potenti, influenzati dai poliritmi africani, dalla techno hardcore e dai film horror italiani degli anni ‘70.

Nkisi, musician, visual artist and co-founder of NON Worldwide – a collective of experimental artists from across the African diaspora – produces intense, powerful club pieces influenced by African polyrhythms, hardcore techno and 1970s Italian horror films.

Endi Tupja è un’artista albanese, che vive tra Tirana e Berlino. Per il suo progetto selezionato da LIVE WORKS,  l’artista approfondisce la sua ricerca sulle tecniche di scrittura performativa e di messa in scena di donne albanesi nel contesto italiano, oscillando tra gli anni ’30 , gli anni ’90 e il presente. L’artista utilizza la (de)spettacolarizzazione e la dirompenza di diverse forme interconnesse e sottomesse di aree sud-mediterranee per riflettere sul genere, sulla prossimità, sul travaglio e sul periferico, frammentando così dall’interno lo spazio delle proiezioni (post)imperiali italiane. La ricerca di questa artista si concentra sulla sperimentazione di strategie di recupero della memoria, sulla visualità e sulla geomorfometria sovvertita che influenza l’identità e la storia. Nel suo lavoro si percepisce chiaramente un continuo tentativo di sfidare certe idee di formalità istituzionale nella ricerca artistica e nel linguaggio accademico.

Endi Tupja will broaden further her research in performative writing and staging techniques of Albanian female voices in the Italian context oscillating between the 1930s, 1990s and the present. The (de)spectacularization and disruptiveness of different interrelated and subjugated forms of mediterranean south(s) are vehicles she uses to reflect on gender, proximity, labor, and the peripheral. Thus fragmenting space from the inside out of Italian (post)imperial projections. 

Endi Tupja is an artist, filmmaker, and cultural practitioner based between Berlin and Tirana. Her research centers on experimenting with strategies of memory recuperation, visuality and the subverted geomorphometry influencing identity and history. A continuous attempt to challenge certain ideas of institutional formality in artistic research and academic language, are clearly perceivable throughout her work. She is currently part of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck (Austria). She was awarded a CAS SEE fellowship by the Regional Center For Advanced Studies at the University of Rijeka (Croatia) for her research on the project All the Missing Caregivers. 

Harald Beharie (he/they) è artista di origini norvegesi e giamaicane e residente a Oslo. La sua pratica attraversa vari formati e contesti mettendo fortemente in discussione le nozioni di normatività. Batty Bwoy è una performance in collaborazione con Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi e Ring van Möbius, che prende ispirazione dagli stereotipi, dalle emozioni e dalle fantasie sui corpi e le identità queer. Il lavoro ha trovato ispirazione nelle mitologie, negli stereotipi disgustosi, nei sentimenti e nelle fantasie del corpo e delle identità queer, nei testi omofobici delle dancehall, nei film gialli italiani degli anni ’70, nelle “gully queens” resistenti e nelle voci queer della Norvegia e della Giamaica che hanno visitato e preso parte al processo.

Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi, and Ring van Mobius. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns the myths of the queer body to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked. Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates through the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.
Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy, and batty energy! The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings, and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens,” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process. The project is a co-production with Dansens Hus, Oslo, and RAS, Sandnes, and premiered on January 20th, 2022.

Harald Beharie (he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo. While applying various formats and contexts his practice looks into alternative modes of being, dancing and existing together while questioning notions of normativity. Harald holds an interest for the unpolished, the DIY and vulnerability of being in the unknowing. His choreographic practice unfolds in various constellations with other artists using dance as a medium for creating elusive spaces of ambivalence and fantasy, oscillating between deconstruction and construction, optimism and doubt, apathy and affect. Some of the leading interests in his work at the moment are dissecting known physical narratives and opening for a conscious naivety and playfulness while indulging into practice of the pathetic, collapsing, joyful, failing and persistent body. Harald’s focus is being with local people, local ideas, and developing ideas with and within the community. Harald’s work has received nominations for the Norwegian Critics Association prize for the performances Shine Utopians with Louis Schou (2020) and the solo work Batty Bwoy (2022).

Alice Giuliani e Camilla Strandhagen si sono incontrate due anni fa a Bruxelles. La performance che presenteranno a Centrale Fies contiene tracce e ispirazioni da testi e teorie che indagano il dolore invisibile di alcune malattie croniche,  intrecciate alle loro esperienze personali. La performance attraversa tre capisaldi teorici come il concetto della Spoon Theory, metafora che descrive la quantità di energia fisica e mentale che una persona ha a disposizione per le attività quotidiane, quando è limitata (Christine Miserandino, 2003 “The Spoon Theory”); la crip-time, la relazione col tempo che le persone con disabilità sperimentano, dai tempi morti che i luoghi meno accessibili impongono, a quelli delle persone con stanchezze croniche consumano il tempo di una persona; la Sick Woman Theory di Johanna Hedva, che vede le  modalità di protesta politica femminile interiorizzate come sofferenze reali. A tessere queste esperienze tra teoria e vissuto reale di ragazze con malattie invisibili croniche, c’è proprio la loro ricerca performativa.

And everything is as porous as a bodily crack is a place of soft dramaturgy, where time pours into its own pace and where two spoonies play each other’s guardian and unveil their hidden scars. Alicé and Kmila travel through intimate, sci-fi, distorted galaxies to talk about that which is so hard to explain.

Alice Giuliani is an Italian crip-spoonie artist based in Brussels. She is intrigued by the body as a place of fantasy, identity and vulnerability. In the past years she collaborated as a performer for various productions in Europe mainly focused on vibrant and emotional body languages; pop & opera singing; practices to potentiate crip & spoonie superpowers. As a maker she is working on a project calle A.ROOM.POURED.OVER.ME, a live concert-performance and an intimate digital memoir around some of those invisible days of chronic pain.

Camilla Strandhagen is a performer and dance-maker from Norway, who through choreography attempts to give attention to the unstable, weak and seemingly invisible. Curious about the tension between physical and mental states, Camilla evokes temporary places, in which the body becomes a sensorial site, to experiment with ways to encounter in precariousness and wonder. Camilla and Alice met a few years ago in Brussels. And everything is as porous as a bodily crack is their first collaboration. Their spoonie sisterhood unfolds in fictional characters that investigate how chronic illness brings them closer together, to the murky borderlands and their superpowers.

Questo artista irlandese sceglie di lavorare sul concetto di anarchia ponendosi una domanda: e se fosse proprio l’anarchia la risposta definitiva all’ordine? In scena tre performer si esibiscono, a fianco di un batterista, muovendosi tra le linee del simbolo dell’Anarchia disegnate col gesso sul pavimento, in un susseguirsi di azioni che vengono lasciate correre o stoppate a seconda degli eventi. Il lavoro artistico di Eoghan Ryan si snoda tra diverse discipline, dalle installazioni video alla performance, ma utilizza anche marionette e collage per narrare la sua idea si “disintegrazione degli stati di identità”. Col termine “stati” l’artista intende sia quelli dell’essere, così come le nazioni o quegli spazi in cui le consistenze e le contingenze ne cambiano la forma. 
Se l’Anarchia si afferma come risposta all’ordine, Circle A di Eoghan Ryan pone l’accento sulla parola “risposta”. In altre parole significa mettercela tutta per disfare un sistema. In scena tre performer si esibiscono, a fianco di un batterista, muovendosi tra le linee del simbolo dell’Anarchia disegnate col gesso sul pavimento, in un susseguirsi di azioni che vengono lasciate correre o stoppate a seconda degli eventi.

If you’re constantly stuck in the same drama that never ends, it’s not even tragedy. It’s not a good piece of art, it’s just a bad situation!
Anarchy can be affirmed as a response to order. As such, Circle A by Eoghan Ryan puts full emphasis on the temporality of the word ‘response’. In other words, trying your hardest to undo a system. 
Three performers wearing tap shoes, work within the constraints of the Circle A symbol sprayed to the floor. They are influenced by a live drummer and a deconstructed sound score composed of stems that come together and fall apart. The performers work out a tight set of actions. These actions are accompanied by lesser and greater degrees of agency; so how they interrelate in a system for a live audience becomes somewhat unpredictable. That’s why they need to experiment, for 45 minutes, eliminating codification from all but one emergent, anticipatory level.

Eoghan Ryan works with video installation, performance, puppetry and collage to address the disintegration of states of identity. These range from states of being and nation states to the cultivation of provisional culture, in art as much as bacteria. Eoghan’s performances have been shown at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, Amsterdam Dance Event, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten; IMMA, Dublin; Serralves, Porto in collaboration with Jassem Hindi; Catalyst, Belfast; Chisenhale Dance Space; Kem, Warsaw; Cubbit Gallery and Rowing; London amongst others. Recent commissions and screenings have taken place at Busan Biennale, ICA, London and IFFR Rotterdam. Eoghan’s performance commission for Live Works is supported by Mondriaan Fonds.

Endi Tupja è un’artista albanese, che vive tra Tirana e Berlino. Per il suo progetto selezionato da LIVE WORKS,  l’artista approfondisce la sua ricerca sulle tecniche di scrittura performativa e di messa in scena di donne albanesi nel contesto italiano, oscillando tra gli anni ’30 , gli anni ’90 e il presente. L’artista utilizza la (de)spettacolarizzazione e la dirompenza di diverse forme interconnesse e sottomesse di aree sud-mediterranee per riflettere sul genere, sulla prossimità, sul travaglio e sul periferico, frammentando così dall’interno lo spazio delle proiezioni (post)imperiali italiane. La ricerca di questa artista si concentra sulla sperimentazione di strategie di recupero della memoria, sulla visualità e sulla geomorfometria sovvertita che influenza l’identità e la storia. Nel suo lavoro si percepisce chiaramente un continuo tentativo di sfidare certe idee di formalità istituzionale nella ricerca artistica e nel linguaggio accademico.

Endi Tupja will broaden further her research in performative writing and staging techniques of Albanian female voices in the Italian context oscillating between the 1930s, 1990s and the present. The (de)spectacularization and disruptiveness of different interrelated and subjugated forms of mediterranean south(s) are vehicles she uses to reflect on gender, proximity, labor, and the peripheral. Thus fragmenting space from the inside out of Italian (post)imperial projections. 

Endi Tupja is an artist, filmmaker, and cultural practitioner based between Berlin and Tirana. Her research centers on experimenting with strategies of memory recuperation, visuality and the subverted geomorphometry influencing identity and history. A continuous attempt to challenge certain ideas of institutional formality in artistic research and academic language, are clearly perceivable throughout her work. She is currently part of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck (Austria). She was awarded a CAS SEE fellowship by the Regional Center For Advanced Studies at the University of Rijeka (Croatia) for her research on the project All the Missing Caregivers.