rhythm & chaos

2020

In a time of contagion and isolation, rhythm & chaos imagines erotic submission as a survival strategy. With explicit candour, landscape and body become entangled, emerging as a fog from the chasm between desire and memory. In yearning to be hollowed out, the subject calls for chaos, for a kind of death, an erosion from which another future might be formed.

rhythm & chaos was made at the invitation of VestAndPage for the collective performance-based film Mirror in the Mirror. With additional words by John King and (quoted) Franco 'Bifo' Beradi; additional filming by Kate Stonestreet; additional editing by Verena Stenke. Music by Nat Norland.

we keep swallowing the time that we have.

ANAM CARA - Mirror in the Mirror is a collective performance-based film about the concept of home, as part of the HOME cycle of collective performance operas by and with VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. Produced during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic global lockdown in April and May 2020, twenty-two artists co-existed and co-created across Venice, Florence, Athens, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Neckarsulm, London, Folkestone, Lincoln, Boston and Toronto.

The result is the filmic journey through an imaginary Mirror Palace, a home of sorts. In the rooms, we encounter the artists of the collective in performance action, rituals and poetic sharing about their isolated notions of home. The Mirror Palace is a place-non-place, where the invisible is made visible and vice versa. It has no inside or outside, but rooms and spaces that we recognise because they originate from the depths of our hearts. There, encounters continue to be possible despite distance, quarantine and insulation. What does the term "home" mean when we are forced there, and when insecurity, unpredictability, disease and death are the denominators of the moment? What can body-based artists speak about then, and to whom? How, though physically distant, can we keep up a collective co-creative spirit, acting in hope and courage?

A production by VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective, 2020

By and with VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes), Aldo Aliprandi, Marianna Andrigo, Sabrina Bellenzier, Giorgi de Santi, daz disley, Marisa Garreffa, Francesco Kiais, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Ashley-Louise McNaughton, Enok Ripley, Sara Simeoni, Mauro Sambo, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Marcel Sparmann, Susanne Weins, and contributions by Marilyn Arsem, Franko B, Giorgio de Battisti, Susanna Petternella and Giovanni Dantomio (We Exhibit). With original music by Aldo Aliprandi, daz disley, Nat Norland and Mauro Sambo.

The film is inspired by the surreal book The Mirror in the Mirror by Michael Ende.