Terrain d’expression pluriel et transversal, le festival Les Urbaines recueille les formes et courants émergents des arts sonores, visuels et performatifs, portant en germe les esthétiques de demain. Entièrement gratuit, il réunit au sein de différents espaces de Lausanne, Renens et Chavannes une quarantaine de propositions (œuvres plastiques, live, DJ sets, performances, ateliers) dans un partage festif et dissonant, qui invite au déplacement des perceptions. L’exposition à l’Espace Arlaud se prolonge jusqu’au 12 décembre.
Very happy that I will be showing “An attendee” at festival Les Urbaines this year, 3rd and 4th of December at Arsenic, Lausanne. This show hasn’t been yet much around and still needs a life to live. As it is always simplified, here the programme text I wrote in full length about this work:
Through a subtle and precarious approach,“An attendee” tries to guide the audience perspective into the details of space, along the edge of (un)spectacular events, towards the frictions of different encounters. Small stimulation open up to bigger questions, emotionally and energetically charged, as a single performer finds themself in the company of a set of things, fragments and sounds. Upon encounter they transform into subjects, into micro narratives and locations, sketching out a place of memory, loss and hope, where leftover voices give their account.
As the performer moves along and with them, a precise, soft and concentrated body emerges that tries to attend to these accounts, encapsulated in the environment. In the attempt of overcoming a present state of affair towards another state of “future”, the performer has to meet it’s own projections, obsessions and internalised violence and wounds.
The practice that this work brings to the foreground tries to investigate the utility of being in a broken place, that a priori to fixing or saving, asks to be embraced with delicacy and care, with trouble, yet attention. The viewer is invited to join and rest in this space too, without pushing for answers, judgement and absolution, and to give in to disquiet.
By looking at ecological philosophies and environmental precarity, effectively supported by an isolating pandemic, Antonia Steffens is investigating anew what the notions of “environment” can mean within the theatrical and artificial realm of the black box. In her practice she refers to the context of visual arts and balancing on the line between two different traditions of mediation, in between spectacle and installation, theatre and still life/exhibition. Being sensitive to western arts traditions, she imitates the "gallery space" to foreground the power of things, objects and more than human reality. Here is where she uses performance and theatre with a notable emphasis on movement to let those things open up, create mystery and discourse, take the lead of the story and question the human body in their arrangement and encounter. An unavoidable aspect of referring to this tradition is to encounter the whiteness of this space, on all levels.