8 July 2019, 19:00
Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 12.
The natural sciences have long accepted the prominent role of humankind in causing and amplifying climate change. The term “Anthropocene”, coined for the current geo-chronological epoch, emphasizes the irreversible environmental footprint left behind by human activity. Climate change is rapidly collapsing even our most basic understanding of the world, as the ecosystems around us are transformed, shifted, and even extinguished at an unparalleled pace. But are we prepared to accept responsibility, collectively or even individually? What role can art play in these times that scream for radical change?
In POLLUTION, Clément Layes addresses the involuntary side effects of an action by stating that even without realizing it, our best intentions might have negative consequences. Using different artistic mediums, Miriam Jakob’s THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (working title) gives an insight into her ongoing research into interspecies communication between humans and great apes, the latter being condemned to a seemingly inevitable demise by the aggressive strategies of global capitalism. The performance by Ana Laura Lozza and Bárbara Hang, CONSUMATION focuses on loss from a social perspective. It explores the production of other corporealities through the juxtaposition of everyday rituals. In the experience-based exhibition NIBIRU 0.2 – ENVIRONMENT, choreographer Tamara Zsófia Vadas, visual artist Márton Emil Tóth and sound artist Ábris Gryllus give an insight into their project NIBIRU, a months-long research project envisioning a post-human world based on the ideas and fantasies of twelve teenaged girls.
The event is accompanied by an essay reflecting on the Anthropocene by Martina Ruhsam titled EXERCISES IN RECONFIGURING #1, written especially for this edition of Montag Modus.
Clément Layes / Public in Private: Study for Klimata – POLLUTION
In this study, POLLUTION, Clément Layes looks into the things that unwillingly accompany a given action, focusing on pollution, waste and destruction. He studies the things we want and how we want them, even when their side effects become toxic. Strangely, it seems that these byproducts of our actions can become so significant, they might even outperform the actions themselves. Through the construction of a two-sided character, Layes explores different perspectives of success and failure within the realm of ecology as proposed by the Klimata series.
Clément Layes (GER/FR) has been living and working as a choreographer and performer in Berlin since 2008, where he co-founded the company Public in Private together with Jasna L. Vinovrski. At the intersection of choreography, the visual arts and philosophy, his work primarily engages with observations on daily life. His performances – among them Allege (2010), Der grüne Stuhl (2012), Things that surround us (2012), dreamed apparatus (2014), TITLE (2015) and The Eternal Return (2017) – have been shown in various countries and festivals across Europe and North America.
Miriam Jakob: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (working title)
“A great deal is at stake in such meetings, and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending — socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” – Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2008)
Inspired by her somatic research on interspecies communication, Miriam Jakob will explore the paradoxical conditions of encounters between great apes and humans in captivity. The glass wall that separates one from the other, but simultaneously allows for proximity, exchange and playfulness, will be the starting point for her one-week residency at Montag Modus. By interweaving fictional as well as experienced, “real”, encounters between gorillas and humans, which manifest themselves both in zoological gardens and in millennia of ancient myths, she will activate different strategies of exchange and bend the boundaries of fixed constructs to test out a choreography of the in-between. Due to the fact that the “natural habitat” is steadily disappearing, she will explore what it means for the place of encounter to be increasingly restricted to places of confinement.
In her works, the choreographer and anthropologist Miriam Jakob (GER) concentrates on the interface between science and fiction. She explores the expectations and inner borders of audience and performers through performances, lecture-performances, films and installations. Her work creates spaces of desire, where mechanisms of validation lose their meaning and the borderlines of identities blur. Her body of work contains Friday, 23.1.1915 [sic], „as usual, sorry that I do not always…“ (2013), How to become a journey (2013), Travelling to the four Corners of the Earth (2014), Letters to Dance (2016), In the Shadow of Man (2017), i.a. She collaborates as a performer, actress and choreographer, with other artists including deufert&plischke, Angela Schanelec, Martin Nachbar, Lisa Densem, Varinia Canto Vila, Ana Laura Lozza and Zeina Hanna.
Concept: Miriam Jakob
Collaborators: Zeina Hanna, Felix Claßen
Special thanks: Arantxa Martinez, Julia Rodriguez
Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang: CONSUMATION
Consumation is a performance-ritual of cleansing that transforms a simple, daily action into a collective experience. With the only purpose of consuming a soap bar, this performance offers an intimate space to experience matter and the bursting of time. Which in-visible ways of being together can we create? What is the potential of the excess of co-presence? Consumation is part of the research project The fragility of (in)significant things, that through a series of choreographic and performative studies explores the relation between bodies and things in the context of diminishing planetary resources.
Ana Laura Lozza and Bárbara Hang (GER/ARG) have been working together since 2010 under the artistic label Acá No Hay Delivery. They present their work internationally. Their collaborations include: Arcadia (2017), The vanishing meeting (2016), 4 artificios (2013) and That which is the thing (2011). Since 2018, they have been developing the research project The fragility of (in)significant things within which they created Consumation, The throw dance and Remainders. In 2019, they were artists in residence at Casa Encendida / Ca2M with the project the rest of dance that will premier in 2020 at K3-Zentrum für Choreographie/Tanzplan Hamburg.
Ábris Gryllus, Márton Emil Tóth & Tamara Zsófia Vadas: NIBIRU 0.2 – ENVIRONMENT
“You were waiting for Nibiru but we arrived too late. And now we are looking for the last river whose plane is like the mirror. We crossed it by jumping from turf to turf to reach the house from which we can still see the sky. There are just few of us in the middle of the rock field. We build a library from stones, our clothes are dried by the crimson wind and we curl our hairlocks on small tubes before going to bed.”
(Gy.M., a girl from Nibiru)
Legend has it that Nibiru is the tenth planet in our solar system, which is predicted to one day swing out of orbit and collide with Earth, instantly annihilating life as we know it. This apocalyptic scenario spread like wildfire in the popular imagination and inspired the Nibiru performance project, developed by dancemaker Tamara Zsófia Vadas, visual artist Márton Emil Tóth and sound artist Ábris Gryllus in collaboration with teenaged girls between 10 and 18 over a period of several months.
Nibiru 0.2 – Environment, presented at Montag Modus Klimata, is an experience-based exhibition that offers a glimpse into the making of Nibiru. Real and fictitious concerns about the planet, uncertainties of childhood and coming of age rituals are presented in the frame of a guided installation. Rather than fearful, this possible cataclysmic event is portrayed as a utopian territory of dreams.
Dancer, choreographer and dance pedagogue Tamara Zsófia Vadas (HU) is an active participant of the Hungarian contemporary dance scene. Recipient of the Lábán Prize, her works are regularly shown in Trafó, Mu Theatre and are characterized by a transdisciplinary, collective approach and the attempt to redefine the theatre space. In his solo and collaborative musical projects, sound installations, and performative works, media artist and musician Ábris Gryllus (HU) deals primarily with the different space- and situation-specific states of sound. Following the term of prosthesis, visual artist Márton Emil Tóth (HU) transforms everyday objects into anthropomorphic works reflecting on social standards and this system’s increasingly uncertain future. Together, the Budapest-based trio has been experimenting with interdisciplinary performative situations since 2015.
Creators: Tamara Zsófia Vadas, Márton Emil Tóth, Ábris Gryllus
Costume: Marcio Kerber Canabarro
Co-production partner: SÍN Cultural Center, Trafó KMH, Katlan Csoport, Art Quarter Budapest
Martina Ruhsam: Exercises in reconfiguring #1
Martina Ruhsam (GER) is an artist, theoretician and lecturer currently based in Frankfurt am Main. From 2006 until 2017, she realized numerous performances, interventions, transmedial projects and artistic collaborations (primarily with Vlado G. Repnik) that were presented (amongst others) in venues such as Tanzquartier Wien, Wiener Festwochen, Brut, Zankarjev Dom, Kino Šiška (Ljubljana), Museum for Contemporary Art Metelkova/Ljubljana. From 2008 until 2009, she was working in the theory department of Tanzquartier Wien. In 2011, her monography „Kollaborative Praxis: Choreographie“ was published by Turia + Kant. Martina Ruhsam has given lectures about choreography and related philosophical and sociopolitical issues internationally. Currently, she is working on her PhD about the entanglement of human and non-human bodies in contemporary choreographies. The dissertation adviser is Prof. Dr. Bojana Kunst, head of the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen, where Martina Ruhsam has been working as a teaching and research assistant since 2016.