Handle with care featuring Huggy Bears
With contributions by Maggessi/Morusiewicz and verena herterich & Oravin
A cross-section of Vienna's young performance scene will be presented in two parts as part of imagetanz 2022 at Bears in the Park. In this special edition of brut's Handle with care series, the audience gets exclusive insights into three projects and their respective development phases. In the second part, Maggessi/Morusiewicz take us through the wormhole, while verena herterich & Oravin dissect and reassemble time, space, body and narrative.
Maggessi/Morusiewicz – Wormhole Studies #3: Flash/Dim
Technically, a wormhole is a hole in a piece of wood or fruit, produced by insect larvae. It can also be a figurative hole, such as a productive digression that is both a detour and a destination-in-becoming. It can denote a process, for instance, of navigating digital space, of moving endlessly from one web page to another by way of hyperlinks. The laborious slowness underlying the above description clashes with the speed that characterises wormholes in sci-fi narratives from literature, film, and TV. All of the above is brought together by artistic duo Maggessi/Morusiewicz in Flash/Dim, the third episode of their ongoing performative series Wormhole Studies.
Having met through a mutual interest in critical archival studies and practices, Guilherme Maggessi and Rafał Morusiewicz work towards establishing a collaborative artistic-research practice that merges filmmaking, performance, curation, and writing. By employing design, found-footage, sampling, and analogue techniques such as stitching and silkscreening, the duo explores forms of creating archives and inventing futures in expanded and intimate ways.
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verena herterich & Oravin – nonlinearbodies’touch
In a symbiotic performance of body and sound, verena herterich & Oravin explore touch and narration. Incorporating the sonic concept of granular synthesis – a method of creating artificial sounds – and transferring it to body and space in a constant freezing and flowing of time, they experiment with the narrative potential of the interweaving of gestures, sound, words, and space in a fragmentary narration that arises entirely from the gestural moment. Just as sound in granular synthesis is broken down into its smallest individual parts, time, space, body, and narration are repeatedly broken down into their smallest details and put together anew.
verena herterich is a mover, dancer and performer and received her education at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna and AHK in Amsterdam. She pursues her own artistic practice dealing with affective potentials, empathy, resonance, and touch and their spatiality and directionality. Approaching and paraphrasing bodies starting from their structural orientation in movement – their ‘proprioception’ –, she researches communion, contextualisation, and communication within systems.
Oravin is a sound artist with a background in literature and philosophy. His audio-visual text performances have been shown at international literary festivals and have been funded with two START stipends of the Austrian Federal Chancellor’s Office. His debut EP Eye, Iris was released on the label Rest Now in July 2021. Most recently, Oravin was responsible for the sound branding of German art festival futur21. Her explores narrative strategies in both sound and text – a research that is now being expanded in collaboration to include the performative level of the body.
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HUGGY BEARS is a support platform by artists for artists founded by Caroline Madl and Philippe Riéra. It provides mentoring in various fields for emerging artists to help develop their work. The selected upcoming artists receive seven-month-long support that includes studio space as often as needed, workshops, artistic and administrative support, networking, public showing, sharing, and eventually premiering under professional conditions. As part of brut’s Handle with care series, the currently supported artists give the audience a showing of their works in progress, which will eventually premiere at WUK in the autumn of 2022.
The Handle with care series grants sneak peeks into processes of artistic creation, experimenting with new formats and creating spaces for talking and the exchanging of views. Artists get the chance to try out parts of their work in front of a small audience, to receive feedback, and to turn spectators into accomplices.