shortlist live! 2023

Tiziano Cruz (AR): Soliloquy

Soliloquy – I woke up and hit my head against the wall is a performative monologue based on a series of letters written by the artist to his mother.

Tiziano Cruz puts himself front and centre in this performative monologue, based on a series of letters he wrote to his mother in 2020. Cruz’s mother lives in northern Argentina, and he was unable to travel there from his home in Buenos Aires during the first pandemic lockdown. Reaching her across boundaries of geography and class, Cruz uses the letters as the starting point for a critique of economic, racial and institutional oppression.

As an Indigenous artist, Cruz speaks about the suffering his people have endured under a system of white supremacy, examining the role Buenos Aires plays in Argentina’s culture of inequality. Using the power of theatre and the precision of language, Cruz poses a difficult question: What does it mean for him to use his body for art in a country where bodies like his are not supposed to exist?

Autumn Knight (US): SANITY TV

Sanity TV is a live performance with an open-ended structure. There is audience participation. There may be cameras. The artist drives the performance from point to point with improvisation, sound, and space activation. The viewers collaborate to determine the shape of the moment and breathe life into the infinite possibilities. 

“It is an extremely experimental work for me that takes the form of a talk show in which the audience is imaginary and the “guests” – that range from objects to people- are invited into an imaginary dissociative conversational space by myself, the host. [- -] This work feels important, yet effortless; it achieves my goal of working with my strengths as an improvisational performer while instantly critically engaging my ongoing inquiry into psychodynamic theory.” -Autumn Knight, autumnjoiknight.com

JOTA MOMBAçA (BR): sinking could be

sinking could be continues a cycle of Jota Mombaça’s recent site-specific compositions in which an assembly of materials including blue light, sound and cotton textiles are activated in order to inform a practice of elemental sensing.

In this project, the material inquiry is extended to the shoreline and the fluidity of sand, evoking the presence of Sloterplas lake, mined for sand to build Amsterdam’s Western Garden Cities; as well as to the resilience of aluminum, and the cutting force of water – here, manifested both in the process of sinking, in which the 4 aluminum sculptures that compose the installation are left under the water; and in the process of forming said aluminum sculptures, in which a water jet cutter was used to produce the shapes on a aluminum plaque.

sinking could be was initially produced with the support of the Ammodo Foundation, and presented as a performance and installation at de Appel, Amsterdam.

JOSHUA SERAFIN (PH/BE): VOID LIVE PERFORMANCE

Void is a work by Joshua Serafin in which we see the creation or birth of a god(dess) for the future. This god, Void, needs to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god(dess) of this time. Void’s choreographic movements embody the sadness, pain and grief of our current society.

Void gathers all the sadness, all the memories of hurt and longing, and turns them into pearls to keep in the astral realm, where the memories are kept for the gods to learn and archive humanity’s pain. When everyone is asleep, Void takes in all universal pain; when humanity  awakes, their sadness feels lighter.

The live performance of Void is a physical manifestation coming from the video work. It is the 2nd iteration of a bigger cosmology of work titled “Cosmological Gangbang”. This piece is a conversation with live musician and a prerecorded soundscape. In the performance, we see Void on an island installation blending into its environment. Two light pillars that extend to the sky create a portal that connects the spirit and mortal realms. Void converses to the soundscape, the ecological and meta-realm landscape surrounding it. Its dance creates a ritual of birth, and rebirth, collecting global sadness and its beauty. An embodiment of our current society. In this performance we see an excerpt of the film “Creation Paradigm” where it narrates the origin of Void.

“Through the language of dance and choreography, Void (25’) by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this piece is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of their bodily presence and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity. Void, this speculative new God, appears on earth to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god of a new time. In the words of the artist, the impetus for creating this work is to decolonize the self and to question heteronormative ideologies that were implemented in the Philippines and across the world by the west through religion. It takes as a starting point the Filipino pre-colonial identity which is fluid and doesn’t conform to binary representation, as is the case in many other pre-colonial societies.“
– Inti Atawallpa Guerrero