Professionals: WE SUPPORT ARTISTIC AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

A fabric dances in the air. Your body mimics. Your chest expands, your gaze lifts, your breath deepens, your spine straightens, you feel pulled toward something greater than yourself. It’s beautiful, yet a technology of persuasion that bypasses critical thought and plant political affects directly into our bodies. In their performance AeReA (2019), which recently unsettled audiences at the KoresponDance festival, Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi (IT/DE) strips flags of their national insignia to reveal their “plastic essence”. However, this raises questions: if the performance reveals the mechanisms of political spectacle, does it simultaneously reproduce them?

Hungarian artist Dávid Somló makes do with little. He collects twigs in the forest himself, then simply lets viewers balance them on the smallest point of their finger knuckles. Holding fragile nature in balance, all shrinks to one point in time and space. It’s an economical gesture – unsustainable in its instability, yet profoundly sustainable. The participatory performance Delicate Balancing of Twigs emerged as a work in progress within the Green Streets of Europe project, where artists develop methods for more sustainable performance art. Both ethos and aesthetics lie in restraint and modesty.

Dance relies on the human body – for it may be the most anthropocentric of all art forms. Yet through the body, we are connected to our environment – people and the entire geosphere. How can we simply be with that? How can we transcend human self-centeredness in aesthetics and ethics? The project Vigil Custody explores the question of “how to be” – both physically and intellectually, through art, and the science of geology. In this conversation, Zden Brungot Svíteková (Ostružina, SK/CZ) and Napsugár Trömböczky (SVUNG, HU) traverse a multilayered landscape of reflections on the material intelligence of bodies – both stone and human – on their mysteriously intimate kinship, and on the methods and language of art and science that sensitises us to that.