My practice is situated within an inquiry into our human and more-than-human relationalities. This research proceeds through two interconnected strands: (1) the cultivation of my own embodied relationships with geological and more-than-human materialities, which I articulate and examine through my performances; and (2) the creation of performative environments composed of installations and speculative scores (and sometimes also my own body), which invite the audience to develop their own relationships with more-than-human. In this way, when the audience engages with he scores and the more-than-human beings present in the space, the performance thus takes place within each body.
Before I came to the MA programme at the Iceland University of Arts, and after I’ve performed the seminal piece for this current research It is a timeless journey towards your temporarily warm arms for Kunsthalle Bratislava where I attempted, for the first time, to dance with a geological being, a city cliff, I felt that I am quite literally, as well as metaphorically, hitting a hard wall. After a chipped tooth, bruised hips and bloody knees gained during the intensive rehearsal time, I felt that the geological doesn’t care for this dance; in fact, my own embodiment, due to the huge differences in our temporal natures, might seem like a ghostly being, barely, if at all, even there for this city-dwelling cliff. It could pass through my body and terminate this little lifetime of mine without even a scratch.
[…] and the arrogance to think that I am a geological force,
when I’m only a ghost
This excerpt of the spoken-word poem featured during the performance, with the reference to the above-mentioned experience, and the critique of the Anthropocene, which willingly or not, can easily slip into the human supremacy that has led to this very condition.
Nevertheless, I wanted to stay true to this experience, which could, in some ways, be perceived as a failure of my endeavours to dance with the geological beings. In some ways, it is an impossibility; at the same time, and paradoxically so, it is also a present-day reality that we are already immersed in for quite some time. Materially speaking, we already share a lot of minerals and elemental materials within our embodiments. After we die, our bodies usually, at least in some ways, and at the end completely (depending on the temporal scale in question), integrate and mingle with the geological body. So, although this dance might be an impossibility for us within our current lifetime (due to its incompatible timescale and material density), it is something that we will inevitably do after it. This is where I came to the understanding that what I can endeavour and propose, within my work, is rather a warm-up or a stretching exercise for this dance that takes place across times and rhythms larger than our single lifetime. It is both an impossibility and what we’re already part of, thus the combination of the speculative as well as concrete nature of the scores embody this very notion, allowing the audience to create performance within their own bodies, activating imagination and creating a visually compelling site of shared relationalities.
Sometimes, I’ve considered the scores to be spells (for breakdown, cocreation and much more). Spells are a series of words that are considered to have magical power. If you're under a spell, then what you do is out of your control. In that sense, you’re allowing yourself to be part of other and sometimes larger processes. Within this work, spells resonate because they bring forth a reality, a futurity into now, they move things into existence. Spell, from this perspective, are an embodiment of relational attunement with more-than-human forces.
Below are the scores from each iteration of the performance. Some scores had slipped into the next performances, while others have given space to new scores.