PORTALS AND CONSTELLATIONS 2024
VIPAW 2024
A note from PAV’s artistic director
The IX VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK, titled Portals and Constellations, addresses the theme of social connection through the lens of performativity. In times of crisis, individual behaviours are transformed by options and alternatives that seem drastically reduced, obstructing prospects for more inclusive futures. Portals are thresholds of critical utopianism, liminal places between the here and now and the not-yet-here. They are entry points to other worlds and new ways of being. Portals can be those of a castle, a cathedral, a palace, or virtual, symbolic gateways. They provide access to other loci and distant places that pertain to our reality and daily life. In this sense, through performance, artists imagine, create, and enable desirable alternative trajectories that indicate, albeit partially, what our societies and humanity need. We access portals by abandoning prejudices to expand awareness and perception, receiving inspiration, and treading new, stimulating paths. Finally, crossing a portal means trusting that change is possible.
MINI MOVIE - FREE SCREENING VIpaW 2024
LIVE PERFORMANCES VIpaW 2024
A collective performance initiated by Future Ritual, A Felling explores ideas of death, remembrance, transformation, rebirth and the transferrence of energy.
Using psychomagic gore aesthetics and ritual-political body piercing, this performance reflects on the already begun hybrid “Third World War.” An act of radical labour which utilise the “traces” and “debris” from the performance to create a conceptual dreamcatcher installation for people to interact with during the remaining days of the exhibition.
STRATA - THE FILM VIpaW 2024
A film of philosophical, poetic action, STRATA blends film and performance art to explore the fascinating history of caves as sites of knowledge-making and art creation. Through interdisciplinary processes, artists and researchers investigate the connection between the human body and the geological depth of subsurface environments. The project focuses on the prehistoric caves of the Swabian Jura, where Ice Age humans sought shelter and created the oldest known examples of human figurative sculptures. The caves are the symbiotic realms to dance between embodiment and scrutiny, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed.
Coming together to look into the river of human civilisation and to share what they had found, the artists irradiate concepts of time, ecological intelligence and politics through performances for the camera. The film pinholes a perspective on a world where art, science and multiple perspectives nourish each other in co-creative processes. Nestled inside the dark subsurfaces of the land, the artists confront romantically distorted images of nature and naturalness to dismantle consolidated narratives and aesthetics. The human body and stratified societies are tied in continuity to the geological, beheld through a lens of queer ecology.
