February 15 as part of WHAT REMAINS , ARC Gallery (Defibrillator), Chicago, IL https://dfbrl8r.org/event/remains-chapter-two
Video documentation by Lola Blake.
Curated by ieke trinks.
6 hours, 02/15/2020
Created and performed by Esther Neff+Kaia Gilje
PROTAGONY: I am a broom who sweeps
1) Audience members fill out one of the 9 “conceptual event survey” cards (Loss, Revelation, Conflict, Transition, Accident, Sickness, Transgression, Breakage, Achievement) and puts that card through the slot in the hand-sewn curtain that says I AM A(N) ______ WHO _______
2) Kaia and Esther either take turns reading the scores generated by audience responses through a microphone while the other embodies that score, or perform together,
using 13 objects/materials that 'remain' from past performances: a bell, a pair of underwear, broom, chain, clock, clothes pins, eyelashes, green paintballs, ironing board, tiles, red folding chair, sharpener, and broken stones
"Kaia Gilje and Esther Neff work on wearing down the ridges of perception that divide inanimate objects from humxn bodies. “Performance art” often deals with animation and the vibrancy or liveness of matter/materials, both from ancestral perspectives and from contemporary theoretical physics perspectives. This work approaches “What Remains”? As a question about what and who and how is “alive,” inquiring into the qualities of liveness and deadness, use and function, enlivening, and being enlivened by."
Some scores generated through this durational performance were used in PROTAGONY: A Play
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Photos by Angeliki Chaido Tsoli for Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Chicago