Performance Studies: On Extraction

Performance study with Valentina Desideri, Alix Eynaudi, and Anne Juren in the context of the exhibition Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims.

Free admission.

The event will be held in English.

The invitation for this session is to gather in study around notions and practices of extraction. We will use dance and performance tools and methods (such as somatic and movement practices, scores for collective thinking and critical inquiry, the composition of scenes, props, or scripts, amongst other possible tools) to sense and make sense of extraction. The study session will last 3 hours, it will happen inside the exhibition space, and therefore it will also be a public performance of sorts. You can come and go at any time and watch or participate. We will play with the specific modes of plotting and unplotting attention that the performance setting provides and let it contribute to our study.

This proposal is part of Valentina Desideri's ongoing research project Studio Practice which experiments with ways of knowing – ways of sensing and making sense – that are collective and transversal, as they take in consideration and move through different layers of existence (emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual). Studio Practice plays with methodologies and tools that produce new knowledge and produce knowledge differently, or with tools that gather us in study. Desideri considers the “studio” not only as the place wherein to study, but as the specific conditions that make study possible.

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), an MA in Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a BA in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London). She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org.

Alix Eynaudi dances, works and writes between craft and chaos in a (most of the time) joyful mess. She doesn’t work alone; any event, research, invitation is an alibi to spend time with accomplices, a mesh of friendships scintillating under skins, a stirring of a full-of-wonder support. She specializes in (deep) choreographic hanging out sessions.

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer, artist researcher and Feldenkrais Practitioner born in France. She lives and works in Vienna, where she founded the Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung association in 2003. Juren’s choreographic and artistic works are shown in theatres and museums, at festivals and at biennial exhibitions worldwide. In her artistic practices, Juren seeks to expand the concept of choreography by exploring the body's sensorial, kinaesthesia and soma poetics. Juren has been a Feldenkrais practitioner and soma therapist since 2013. In 2021, she finished her PhD at the Stockholm University of the Arts under the supervision of André Lepecki and Sandra Noeth.