With Emma Howes and Jao Moon
Performance-based Research Presentation
Tuesday, 13.08.2024 at 6 PM
Diaphanes, Dresdener Str. 118
Research Workshops
07–13.08.2024
Playground is an ongoing collaborative performance-based research that takes form in a series of workshops consisting of individual and group performances, reading groups, screenings and discussions. Iterations of the project have been researched and presented in Beirut at Ashkal Alwan (2018) and in Dubai at Alserkal Project Space (under the title Zwischenspiel, 2017) with local performers and non-performers. In this iteration of the research, I work with Berlin-based performers/artists: Emma Howes and Jao Moon.
Employing open-ended strategies of rehearsal, Playground examines movement as written and oral language and as visual and sonic translations. Performers are asked to contemplate their body as a vehicle devoid of affect; a body capable of performing mechanical movement, allowing the conceptual framework in place to define form and aesthetics.
Workshops and MethodologyBefore attending daily workshops over the course of a week, Howes and Moon are asked to video document their immediate realities while focusing on the following statements and questions:
We are experiencing a suppression of our voices, fundamentally transforming how we navigate our public and private spheres—how we move, act, belong and care for ourselves as communities. Pro-Palestine demonstrations over the last few months in Berlin reveal masses of bodies that are alert, fearful, defiant, angry, anxious, cheerful, burnt-out and equally hopeful in search of collective relief, change and strength.
How do our bodies inform our mediated and public spaces and vice versa? Can we study the plural transformation of our collective movement over a determined period of time as a means to overcome oppression, to affect and to find alternative forms of expression through translation, abstraction and the coded? Where do we start and how do we wrap up, if we can at all?
Howes and Moon are asked to reflect on these questions by surveying their spatial, psychological and mediated public and private realities, capturing what is important and striking to them. They submit videos and still images before the start of the workshops, and chosen excerpts from their material are then logged and indexed, culminating in an archive from which they collaboratively research and shape a language of translation based on an isolated set of actions. Their background and subjective implications play crucial roles in developing their research during the workshops following this methodology:
- Actions/Movements are extracted and isolated from the videos submitted by the performers, culminating in an archive from which each performer develops their body-based research.
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Each performer studies from the archive one gesture or action at a time. They perform it.
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Their performances are documented and simultaneously studied and discussed together.
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Each performer continues to work with their initial action; then they render it as a drawing based solely on their last performance.
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Then, they re-perform the action based on a visual depiction that they create.
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Performers are then asked to describe the performance in writing after examining it.
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They re-perform the action based on their writings.
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They read their texts, record it, and play it back in real-time.
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They continue their performance research, this time based on the audio recordings they create, focusing solely on the sound.
- The process continues in whatever order the performers agree on.
So, the research approaches the notion of communication through its means, methods, and media, whether oral, written, or coded; through the transmission of customary, historical, or contemporary stories; and through dialogue, with consideration for the diversity of perspectives.
Public PresentationIn front of an audience, Howes and Moon present several iterations from their explorations. They construct a collective body-based language in real-time. Their research explorations (video, image, audio and text) from the workshops will be on display.
Emma Howes Emma Howes works as a translator between movement and form. Her interdisciplinary works manifest as multiple reconfigurations of the body and space informed by her background in dance, performance theory, and the visual arts within the framework of a conceptual art practice. Her labor is guided by observations of gestures with a focus on the development of an expanded choreographic practice incorporating public interventions, kinaesthetic and architectural research, and an underlying drawing component in the form of graphic scores for performances – compositions representative of a stage in the development from concept and intention to depiction and effect.
Jao Moon The experience of growing up in the marginalized periphery of Cartagena de Indias Colombia turned Jao Moon into a political body. Living in an environment of constant resistance made them question the predominant social orders, this became the matter of Jao Moon’s work. Jao Moon’s work includes Memory of Dislocation - Exactly the same in the opposite direction at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, The Lifetime of Fire - Manifestos for a Queer Futures at HAU, Everybody can be / Everybody can not be My at Ballhaus Naunynstraße. His collaborations and works have been presented at: Volksbühne, Sophiensaele, Studio Я Maxim Gorki Theater, Deutsche Oper Berlin and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Team Artistic Direction: Ali El-Darsa
Researcher-Performers: Emma Howes & Jao Moon
Sound Designer: Richy Carey, èist sound
Videographer: Karam Ghossein
Diaphanes: Marie Glassl
Former Researcher-Performers Beirut, 2018
Bassam Abou Diab, Ghida Hachicho, Stephanie Kayal, Christel Salem and Corinne Skaff.
Dubai, 2017
Hened Choueiry, Sandra Egido Ibañez, Vrushali Kulkarni and Isaac Sullivan.
10:00–19:00
Screening of The Image Remains the Same
Day 2 Program
With films by Renata Poljak & Bouchra Khalili
Art Explora Museum Boat, Venice, Italy
17:00 –19:00
Conversation
The forces that push from beneath the surface
Conversation between curator Amanda Abi Khalil and artists Mounira Al Solh (Lebanese Pavilion), Ali El-Darsa and Nathalie Harb. The conversation will be followed by the unveiling of a commissioned work for the museum boat journey by artist Akram Zaatari.
Art Explora Museum Boat
Riva Sette Martiri, Venice, Italy
April 20, 2024 / 18:30–11:30
On the occasion of the 60th Venice Biennale, Art Explora, TBA21 and LAS Art Foundation are pleased to invite you to a great Ocean Evening.
TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space
Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Castello 5069
The Image Remains the Same
4K Video, Color, Stereo, 18m27s
English and Arabic with English subtitles, 2023
A collage of personal and public accounts, The Image Remains the Same contemplates water as an allegory of journeys filled with desire, belonging, hope, and demise stretching from the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles to the Mediterranean Sea, specifically the El-Mina port of Tripoli, where Ali El-Darsa speaks to locals about emigration from the shores of Tripoli to Europe.
RSVP
Former Exhibitions & Screenings
Mar. 3, 2024 / Footprints of the Forgotten: Video Works on Immaterial Archives, LA FilmForum, Los Angeles
Oct. 14, 2023 / Räume mit Aussicht, Kunsthaus Mitte, Berlin
Acknowledgments
The Image Remains the Same has been made possible through support from The Department for Culture & Social Cohesion (The cultural exchange stipend of the federal state of Berlin) & the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V.
Ali El-Darsa works in moving image, performance, sound and installation. His work examines structures of belonging in transnational contexts, emphasizing the specificity of time-based media’s significance to creating networked, mediated memories and narratives. His interdisciplinary research in performance opens onto fields of text, word, sign and languages, questioning collaboratively the ways in which language influences thought systems and, by extension, the discourses and interpretations of a work of art, both in its matter and metaphorical sense. It approaches the notion of communication through its means, methods and media, whether oral, written or coded; through the transmission of customary, historical or contemporary stories.
El-Darsa lives in Berlin. He holds a Master of Visual Studies from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. His work has been internationally exhibited.
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Contact
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