The journey of Eutopia Dystopia in Europe goes on: artist Inga Gerner Nielsen will showcase part of the project installation during the Performance Knowledges conference in Malta.
After the pilot in Denmark, the social reading activity on Betwyll and the official premiere at Polo del ‘900 in Turin, the journey of Eutopia Dystopia goes on with a new stage in Malta. The opportunity is given by the annual conference Performance Knowledges: Transmission, Composition, Praxis hosted by the School of Performing Arts of the University of Malta in cooperation with the Centre for Dance Research of Coventry University, UK School of Performing Arts. The seventh edition of the international conference will take place in Valletta from 11 to 13 March 2020.
The interview as a convergent point
Inga Gerner Nielsen, artistic director of Eutopia Dystopia, will showcase a reduced version of the performance installation within her interactive presentation The Interview as a Convergent Point between Qualitative Research and Performance Art. The idea is to show how the combination of qualitative research and immersive performance has influenced her audience’s aesthetic perception and imaginary realm.
The immersive performance method used in Eutopia Dystopia is in fact based on a qualitative phenomenological interview technique the artist has previously developed to research the audience experience in interactive performance installations. In Eutopia Dystopia the performers use this technique to make the audience re-experience a personal memory from their life, which they are invited to orally describe in detail. Some stories are written down and placed sculpturally on the floor of the installation. Others are embodied in a choreography of movements. When reaching its limits, language may in fact break into metaphor or physical gestures – and the performance installation as a site for research renders these modes of expressions possible. All the stories collected are feeding into a somatic archive of the European identity, whose actual existence is what the project is aiming to trace and explore.
The installation will be complemented by the presentation of the video article professor Falk Heinrich, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Aalborg University, is making about how this interview methods produce artistic content.
Eutopia Dystopia is a two-year project realized with the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo within the grant CivICa, projects of Culture and Civic Innovation.