‘presence (Un) presence’, an evolving iterative installation piece started mid 2020, traces the increasingly blurred distinction between our material real and a simulated technological reality. Where the larger cultural narrative seems to suggest no boundaries are left between what is lived and what is mediated, the space we find ourselves in is defined by an increased questioning of place and need for bearing. Fusing site, performance, video technology and the human senses, the piece stages a radically slowed-down choreography between 2 – 4 performers who silently scan our four fundamental postures —standing, walking, sitting, lying down— as the means to negotiate a heavily medialised installation environment.
presence (Un) presence @ Errant Sound, Berlin 2021:
Over the course of 7 – 14 days, by their own progression and without ever physically sharing the same area, the performers connect virtually by means of installed cameras and non-linear video transmission on large-size canvasses mounted in the space. The still, reduced forms drawn by the sustained postures become gradually layered, shifted and displaced through video streaming and superimposed / juxtaposed recordings. At times, instruction-like texts appear on-screen as well. Through its continuous imbrication of relations between the physical and the virtual, a multiplicity of overlapping places is produced and a diffused temporal density in which the work’s chronology is constantly being re-suggested. Between these unpredictably phasing timelines of the lived moment and the virtual recalled on-screen, a liminal space unfolds where connection and detachment, and presence and absence constantly interweave.
As the most basic articulations of place and self, the postures begin to function as interventions in the surrounding stream of medialisation, quietly protesting the ongoing scrambling of time and location. Still acts of resistance against the ethos of perpetual movement and exchange. Over time, these embodied interruptions increasingly gain both a sensing and contributive function by which to observe, (re)draw and (re)enact the relational space the performers share between them.
presence (Un) presence @ SPARK samverkansplattform för arkitektur & konst, Malmö 2021:
presence (Un) presence is the main focus within a current exploratory chapter of my practice, which intends to pose and speak to questions of musical mediality and agency beyond the audible and the concert setting. It studies how to read principles of musical structure, temporality, materiality and process from within a critical post-media exhibititory context. The work produced so far occupies an intermedium between music composition, spatial installation and durational performance, and activates choreography and performance, registrative techniques, text, and the architectural setting. Through such ‘speculative musical spaces’, an extended musicality is proposed: how can musical ideas and forms travel and convey between different mediums and situations, and function as a generative and experiential device beyond sound and the concert setting?