In 1971, an artist pinned a peanut on a gallery wall. The peanut’s shadow formed the outline of a cloud. The work was titled “Cloud and shadow”. Every time I hold a peanut shell in my hand, I recall this poetic gesture. I was born in 1985. Is there anything real in my memory of that performance?
One shared quality between performance and memory is imperfection. Both are an unfortunate search for an original which is no longer accessible. Both often use prompts to recall the initial event. This year, in the frame of Moving In November, Reality Research Center explores the relation between performance, documentation, reality and memory.
To that end, RRC’s members artists Emma Fält and Alina Sakko are invited to remember two performances from the Moving in November festival in 2022 by RRC’s members without having witnessed them: Tuomas Laitinen’s Audience Body and Matilda Aaltonen’s and Veli Lehtovaara’s Performing Animalities – A Praxis. Is it possible to remember a performance without having experienced it?
A cloud and its shadow is a three-stop journey that revisits the various ways and places in which the memory of each performance may bring us together during the festival: Alina’s performance gesture recalling Performing Animalities – A Praxis, the day’s Soup Talk organised by Moving In November, and Emma’s performance gesture conjuring the Audience Body.
Note: “Cloud and shadow” was the work of Marina Abramovic from the exhibition “Little things”.
This event is a part of the Focus on the Local Landscape program within the frame of Moving in November.
Schedule:
Alina Sakko at 11.15, Sörnäinen metro station
Emma Fält at 14.00, Kallio Library
Reality Research Center (RRC), founded in 2001, is a Helsinki-based collective of artists with the shared aspiration to observe, question, and renew reality through performance. RRC believes that art opens the spectrum of reality. Performances are both the tool and the outcome of our research. Every year RRC produces several projects that challenge and expand not only the prevailing concept of reality, but also the borders and definitions of Live art.
Emma Vilina Fält is a multidisciplinary artist working in diverse working groups with drawing, installation, performing arts, and participatory practices. Their main interests are listening, contact and togetherness that unfold through the act of dialogue and drawing. Fält is inspired by bodies, their boundaries, and ways to connect with the world. They seek to expand and stretch the understanding of drawing, the ways to present it and research reality through the acts of drawing.
Alina Sakko is a dance artist interested in researching the accessibility of contemporary dance on experiential and conceptual levels. Through choreography and performance practice she explores and wishes to share the bodily experience of presence. She dances between the concrete and the abstract, visiting recognisable imagery and poetic landscapes, playing with elements of spectacle. She is interested in kinesthetic empathy as a possibility for dialogue.