CONTEXT
LandScaping is a long term artistic project that navigates between the disciplines of contemporary dance, choreography, performance art, new music and anthropology. The first edition of LandScaping was initiated in 2020 and concluded in 2021. It consisted of a 6-week long artistic research in the Amazonian Rainforest and a series of 3 performances around this experience: the Performance-Lecture LandScaping 0.1 - Mapping the places I have never been, the stage piece LandScaping 0.2 - Das unkartierte Land and the choreographic installation LandScaping 0.3 / Knoten.
In 2022 a new chapter of this project was opened. LandScaping 0.4 settled an on-site research in the Atacama Desert in Chile that originated the work in process presentation LandScaping 0.4 / to the one who´ve been before.
The core of the project LandScaping is based in a continuous practice and ongoing exercise to relate and experience non-human points of view, having plants, roots, rivers, mountains, animals, earth, stones and air as its main agents, positioning humans and non-humans side by side without hierarchy.
LandScaping draws inspiration from the idea of Mitwelt, rather than Umwelt, where different living bodies are co-habitating in connection with each other. This is contrasting an understanding “nature” and natural landscapes as something ‘out there’ – something that one can 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? Does this body belong to the landscape? Does the landscape belong to the bodies?
How can we understand plants as dancing bodies? How can we understand each element of a landscape as part of a choreographic entwinement?
Relating to the perspective of other living bodies is an exercise of decolonization.It reviews European-centered notions of the human body, which has resulted in the establishment of a consumerist position towards non-human bodies. According to the indigenous 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.
How can we revision the position of the human body in relation to non-human agents in choreographic working practices? In this way, the experiments developed under the umbrella LandScaping are characterized by being developed with non-human agencies as their starting points.
With the artistic practices and public performances, LandScaping propose a universe that goes beyond labels and initiates a movement of transformation: digging up the eurocentric choreographic tradition and the anthropocentric way of understanding dance and choreography that puts the human body in the center of all movement.