Performances and Installations

INTONAL FESTIVAL JUNE 2021

Listening to light inhaling (lispering sun)

Cocoons breathing; inhaling light. Strings made of light, stretching across oceans. Cradling each other, caressing each others’ shedding (s)kins.

A two player electro-acoustic string instrument made out of a organically grown kombucha mushroom with 20 meter long strings stretches between two bodies and across the aisle of the church.”

(HEADBANG)

Work in progress showing at SKOGEN, Masthuggsterassen

With kind support from Swedish Arts Council

We are developing a practice and research around the movement of headbanging.

Through practicing headbanging together we can start to deepen a bodily understanding of what it means to leave and create traces – both in our own interior environment, but also in what is perceived as being exterior to us.

We are researching the collective experience which can hold a potential for blurring the borders of the body - both for the practitioner and for the spectator. By doing so the headbanger is refusing to be perceived as singular image. We want to think further on how to destabilize and softy rupture structures and constructs that often seem to stagnate ideas and habits. We are interested in losing control, losing center and losing sight.

We are in the very beginning of our process, very raw, and we want to open up this space of vulnerability and trembling as a platform for instigating conversations and being together. Therefore, we invite you to share this space with us, in complexity, in trouble, in our unfinished business.

E.T ORCHESTRA

Residency at Konstnärsnämnden

with Ahmed El Gendy and Amber Smits

4-14 November 2020

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

A CHOREOGRAPHIC TOOL FOR GETTING LOST.

WHAT IS IT YOU ARE CARRYING AROUND MY DEAR?

PERFORMANCE TOGETHER WITH ELINA BIRKEHAG AT NCCA, GLINKA 25.12.2019 ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

With kind support from the swedish arts council

RESIDENCY TOGETHER WITH ELINA BIRKEHAG NCCA in KRONSTADT, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA THROUGH OUT DECEMBER 2019

How can we travel through spaces and worlds as a conscious listening practice? How can we refuse the traditional tourist ways of consuming cultural differences and the picturesque? How can we collect experiences rather than images while at the same time, question the very notion of collection? Drawing inspiration by works of Pauline Oliveros and Maria Lugones we are practicing listening and "world"-travelling as methods of collaboration. Looking at the map as a translation we are using mapping as a practice for navigating/getting lost while "world"-travelling.

69757401_382882485757377_1310637552734044160_n

69886187_2482243121998801_5873726806481174528_n

Breathing an ocean,

Breathing a sea

(still love u like e.t)

2019 June, Frascati, Amsterdam

2019 July, Uferstudios, Berlin

watch extract! <3

An obsession, i built this watersuit, glued together piece by piece, but there is never enough glue. This plastic holding water, this water holding plastic. A story about leaking, about rising sealevels, about imperfection and how we are all leaking.

The performance ”Breathing an ocean, breathing a sea (still love u like e.t) can be seen as a consequence of the icebergs melting and is ”located” on a flooded island next to the equator.

Spring 2016 I spent a month at ”La Wakaya Current” artist residency at a little island in the Caribbean sea outside of Panama in the region of Guna Yala. The nights were very warm there, I would always wake up in the middle of the night and go to the ocean to cool off. It was quiet and still, the air moist and warm. On my way to the shore I saw fireflies filling the air with dots of light. When I went down into the ocean I had googles and a snorkel swimming under water, there were tiny plankton that light up through touch or maybe move through light. It was as if I was swimming in a warm starry sky. When I got tired swimming I would lay floating in the salty ocean on my back, so salty I could fall asleep right there. Then I would watch the starry sky falling over me, the sky was different there, so far from the cities light pollution, the stars were so bright.

At daytime the native population Guna´s would show us around with boat, we travelled through their archipelago and they would point at the crown of palm-trees sticking up from the water and say ”there was an island here 10 years ago, and here, and here too”. And at the same time it had been raining a-lot less which meant they had shortage of drinking water. They were so aware of climate change because they were living it.

When I later came home I got some strange obsession or dream to build a ”water-suit”, like a spacesuit but a human aquarium of see through plastic, where I breathe through a snorkel and when It fills with water my body expands, deforms through the magnifying optics of water. A survival-pod and a death-pod alike. The negative to a diving-suit, to be in a container of air with the plastic holding water and the water holding plastic.

Spring 2019 it became reality, I glued it together peace by peace, but there is never enough glue. It leaks, I am leaking, we are leaking. I created the performance ”Breathing an ocean, Breathing a sea” where I was wearing this suit that slowly was filling with water and while the audience was creating a collective soundWAVE through their breaths questions rise about floods and the contamination of plastic in our oceans.

Forever flow of wet long fingers at least some millions touching the lights of one another (love u like e.t)

2019 March in Het Veem Theater, Amsterdam

2019 November at SKOGEN, Masthuggsterassen, Sweden

Performed together with Amber Smits

An instrument attaching two bodies, a connection, a tin-can telefone, entangled creatures and icebergs melting.

I have during the past two years built a electronic string-instrument that would connect two people and could only be played by these two people leaning out to create the resonance for the sound. The results of this instrument is showed in my performance ”Forever flow of wet long fingers at least some millions touching the lights of one another (love u like e.t)”

It is a choreographic exploration on the entanglement of sound. It uses the electronic string instrument activated by two bodies as a catalyst for movement and relation. This relation between the two dancers undulates between being a restful point of connection- an umbilical chord, to a sometimes violent attachment. As the tension increases, the strings starts to brake and create a soundscape of icebergs melting, of big shifts in the environment, as well as shifts in our own weight and bodies.

Along with the performance I made an installation of hanging fabric and a two channel animation that was projected on these fabrics.