Ingri Fiksdal (NO) & Fredrik Floen (NO): Spectral
Saturday 31.10. 15.00
ITAK Stage | Suokatu 42/2
Accessible Event
The work is part of Shortlist LIVE! and nominated for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art Award.
Spectral takes shape as a choreographic exploration of a staged and moving landscape of different organisms and things. Within this multitude of human and non-human bodies a series of micro-movements can be perceived, and the configuration deforms and changes over time. The viewer experiences a concentrated, moving, breathing, pulsating, growing ecosystem, which blurs the boundaries between the different materialities.
This emerging performative ecosystem is inspired by molluscs, tardigrades, the sci-fi literature of Nnedi Okarofor, jungles, damp basements, the Annihilation alien, garbage dumps, visual artist Pierre Huyghe, kidney stones, Mandelbrot fractals and much more!
The non-anthropocentric Spectral
Humans are symbiotic beings. We carry ten times as many bacteria inside us as our own cells, and some of us also host various parasites, fungi or viruses. Such, we can see ourselves as clusters of different life forms as much as individuals. We are always also in contact with various other things that work on us. Gravity, the ground we stand on, the air that passes through our lungs and the water that we drink constantly shape
us, even if on a micro level.
In Western thinking it is common to separate things/matter from living beings. This tendency prevents us from recognizing the vitality of matter, the capacity of things (Jane Bennett). But if the distinction between life and non-life collapses, can we become part of the world in a new way?
The Spectral team is inspired by philosopher Timothy Morton, who says that ecological thinking means to see all beings (in the broadest sense) as spectral and to think of coexistence as something radically non-anthropocentric:
“(…) When the life/non-life binary is collapsed and the human/non-human is relaxed, all kinds of spectral creatures start to be seen, nightmarish beings that scuttle about. They are not categorizable. Yet they exist. They look like nightmare beings because of the extreme pressure they exert on existing frames of reference, existing categorical boxes.” (Timothy Morton, Spectral Life)
Safe festival experience
Please follow our general instructions for a Corona safe festival experience!
Please note that the venue is rather small. We highly recommend wearing a mask during the performance.