Bianca Mendonça

LANDSCAPING 0.2 - DAS UNKARTIERTE LAND

Pathways & Crossroads / creative process

LandScaping 0.2 - das unkartierte Land was developed from the experience and from the documentation generated during LandScaping 0.1. In this previous research period I was working intensively on the idea of Mappings and on documenting the Practices of Perception I developed in the Amazonian landscape in the region of Santarém. LandScaping 0.2 started from a collective archive we had gathered during LandScaping 0.1 and that was informed by the different perspectives of the collaborators and the landscape bodies - human and non-human - I met there and communicated with during my research in Santarém.

For LandScaping 0.2, the 3 dancers Anne-Lene Nöldner, Clara Müller, Elsa Artmann, the dramaturg Constanze Schellow and me were in a virtual dialog for several months, in which I was sharing my first impressions of the landscape I had visited with them. They were reworking from these inputs.

This constant dialogue was the key to deal with one of the main challenges of switching from my own process into a shared one: how to work from context-specific questions with a group of performers that not only don’t belong to this context, but also haven´t shared the experience of being there and developing a relationship with this place? How could the practices developed during the creation of LandScaping 0.2 bridge this gap of experiences?

After these months of virtual dialog, when we first met in April to start the rehearsals for LandScaping 0.2, we revisited the Mappings and the Practice of Mapping created during the last months. We repeated some practices collectively in a forest close to Cologne, in order to practice ways of accessing that landscape through the body.

In addition to the Practice of Mapping, the historical-political context that involves this landscape and how we position ourselves in relation to these issues, were aspects we could not and did not want to ignore. For me, as a Brazilian, the relations of Mapping, territorialization and colonialism were latently tangible. Since the beginning of this project, I was very sensitive to the situation of mapping, in the historical context, as a colonial practice which took the territory that originally belong to Amazonian First Nations by force. This was one of the reasons that understanding the Amazonian cosmological relationship with this landscape became one of the main issues for me – to show respect for those who originated from these places and protect it until today. For the performers, who were supposed to work physically on these questions, existed a challenge how to work with these issues performatively from their perspective. How to position themselves towards these layers of historical heritage as someone that comes from outside the context of the landscape in question?

Once we started to work from our collective archive of Mappings and practices, we realized that one task in particular becaume especially meaningful for us: the Dancing Plants. In this task, I showed the performers a video of Amazonian plants being moved by the wind and challenged them to copy the movement of this plant. Later, we combined this task, with the presence of potted plants in the studio, as the two pieces that helped us to solve the puzzle how to connect to an immaterial landscape-experience. The absurd attempt of copying the plants from the video, contained the attempt of embodying the agency of the Amazonian landscape, through a dancing body.

In this way, the task was one of our choreographic and physical associations to the Amerindian cosmological principle of Mitwelt – the profound philosophy of the aliveness of every human and non-human being. This approach also influences our way of relating to the presence of the potted plants in the studio, being more sensitive to their already existing and finding strategies of provoking new agencies.

This network of associations, related to the agency of the plants, is what drove us to our main choreographic question: (How) Can we learn to become dancing plants? But more than trying to successfully solve the (impossible) task to become dancing plants, we engaged in a process of planting ourselves, humanizing the plants we were co-creating with, invited them to be actors on stage, all while searching for creating a non-anthropocentric territory of organic matter.

Sediments

Afterthoughts on LandScaping 0.2

The creative process of Das unkartierte Land was a process of confronting and layering different experiences in relation to a landscape.

Because this project, since the start of the initial research in LandScaping 0.1, involved so many phases of development and experiences with partners from different contexts, one of the main crossroads became the question: how do we transmit (embodied) experiences and points of view? How the experiences of my (interview) partners / informants in Santarém/ were shared with me during my research in the Amazonas, how my own experience with the landscape formed, and how this experience could be passed on to the group of performers I worked with back in Cologne, who all didn’t have a live encounter with the surroundings of Santarém was at the core of LandScaping 0.2.

When I recall the beginning of this journey, I have to think about how Mapping, as a process of documenting experiences, is already in itself a process of transmission, interpretation and materialization of a subject’s experience. It is made from the hands of a strange body in a landscape that it doesn´t belong to while searching for its position in it . To whom belongs the ground ? Foreign bodies, process of transmission and translation were the ideas that navigated through all our experiences in the creation of Das unkartierte Land.