LandScaping - online Archive
online Premiere - 01/ 2022
LandScaping 0.3 / Knoten - Foto Alessandro De Matteis
Text Exert from LandScaping Online Archiv (premiere January 2022)
The seeds of the long term artistic project LandScaping was planted in 2019, starting officially in 2020 (actually at the same time that the pandemic started), blooming its first public performances in 2021. Since then, LandScaping has been shaped by being a continuous practice and ongoing exercise about the non-human point of view:
plants, roots, rivers, mountains, animals, earth, stones, air ...
this project is an exercise of perceiving nonhuman agents as part of human bodies, positioning humans and non-humans side by side, without hierarchy. LandScaping works with idea of Mitwelt, rather then Unwelt, where different living bodies are co-living and connected to each other. It´s the opposite idea of understanding “nature” and natural landscapes as something out there – something that ones observe or consume. It´s the exercise of being or becoming this landscape. LandScaping as verb, as action, as a movement of being other bodies.
How is possible to choreograph and perform from this perspective? Understand plants also as dancing bodies?
Exercising the perspective of other living bodies is an exercise of decolonisation, of reviewing the European centered notion of human body, which has resulted in the establishment of a consumerist position towards non human bodies. According to the indigene leader Ailton Krenak “When we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we strip them of their meaning — an attribute we hold to be the preserve of the human being — we relegate these places to the level of mere resources for industry and extractivism.”
In this way, the experiments developed under the umbrella LandScaping are characterized by being developed under the logic of landscapes, having non human agencies as its starting point, becoming an exercise of perspectives and revision of the position of the human body in relation to non human bodies. It proposes a serie of choreographic practices and public performances that goes beyond labels and searches for a movement of transformation: transformation from the way of relating to the choreographic tradition and to the anthropocentric human body centered to create dance.
LandScaping 0.2 - das unkartierte Land - Foto Martin Miseré