What is the horizon more than two curved lines lovingly embracing you, 2023
Matadero Intermediae (ESP)
Performance, 18’00’’
[1] One of my preoccupations as a sound and movement artist is the (im)possible demarcation between the cultural and the natural. At the Institute for Postnatural Studies I was engaged with geological maps and western notions of space and orientation. With mapping technologies as an example, simple questions appear such as: Where does „I“ end?
(communality and co-existence)
Where does “I” end? Where does landscape, environment, or “the more” begin? Addressing the topic of co-existence: let us think about and through body relations, replacing the hegemony of a vertical, able-bodied, knowledge-production-machine with horizontality, with getting closer to the ground(s) and closer to what surrounds, births and exceeds the human realm. Let us learn and reconfigure languages to express situatedness that is not solely occupied with one’s own human existence.
[2] Where does landscape, environment, or „the more“ begin? US humanities scholar Kathleen M. Kirby explores how concepts of subjectivity are essentially based on assumptions about space. Kirby addresses the problematic interrelationship within which the development of the Enlightenment individual is closely related to a specific concept of space. According to Kirby, mapping historically is a process „to distinguish self from other“ (Kirby 1996: 49). The mapper must not be absorbed by landscape, because cartographic records must remain free of subjective impressions and affect in order to ensure the hierarchical imbalance in relation to the mapped area. European colonial history is characterized by the idea of conquering the horizon. Both the development of technologies that served nautical navigation as well as specific measuring equipment and standardized descriptions of the unknown have contributed to these efforts. With the performance What is the horizon more than two curved lines lovingly embracing you and the accompanying text I seek to encounter horizon(s) beyond this dynamic.
(notions of ground-ing)
Linear perspective, a world (view) rooted in Euclidean geometry, establishes the ground as x-coordinate. But, who has access to such stability? The ground(s) on which you are now located used to be the river bank of the Manzanares River. The embedded stones are remnants that used to guide the flow of the river in its city section. They are of granite and originate from a quarry of the Sierra de Madrid, just outside the city.
[3] Performers: Sarafina McLeod and Lissy Willberg
(cartography and choreography)
The timeline of European cultural tradition classically starts in Ancient Greece. Until the 19th century, the notation of ceremonial and ritual movements or dance sequences was called choreography. While today it is not the recording, but the practice of composing movement and form, that is called “choreography.” Unlike contemporary maps, which claim to capture landscape objectively, an individual movement notation does not prescribe its reading.