Breathing, suffocating and no ground beneath the feet: wounded bodies, wounded landscapes
Claudia Bosse presents HAUNTED LANDSCAPES or the breathing out of earth, the fourth part of her performance series haunted landscape/s that deals with bodies in ruined landscapes and landscapes as ruined bodies. The work continues a theme that has already been the subject of a performance shown on a piece of fallow land in Seestadt Aspern: How can we manage to go on living in the ruins of capitalism? Which temporal polyphonies, which pasts and futures does the so-called present have to deal with? Seestadt Aspern turned out to be a fantastic place for learning to ponder these questions. So this time: Tanzquartier, in the heart of the city. The questions remain the same and could not be cast off on the way from the periphery to the centre. Only the perspective has shifted, becoming more concentrated in the closed space. Seestadt Aspern had “offered” a distraction here and there, juggling various presences at the same time. This is not an option at Tanzquartier Wien, even if the setting is not designed for comfortable viewing. Landscapes and bodies are somewhat exhausted and yet doomed to keep going, keep breathing, keep moving. Stasis is not an option. However, moving and breathing not only mean release and a new beginning but work as well. And the performance makes this palpable in such a drastic way that the currently popular term resilience becomes an empty formula in the process. The complex aesthetic proposed by Claudia Bosse’s theatercombinat is open to different interpretations and relates to such formulas like a reality check by means of poetry. Bodies and landscapes are exposed to capitalist and colonial impositions and can barely breathe. The earth is being mistreated and under stress, but exerts stress, too. It smells of rubber and presents itself as a “mixed” state not only between nature and culture but also between assurance, supply and destabilisation. The earth is a “flat ontology” in Bruno Latour’s sense, whose intellectual work gets an update here not only in terms of being staged (and politicised). It is also quite literally present, although the letters ANT (short for actor-network theory) are placed where the audience usually sits in Hall G. Bruno Latour would be in complete agreement, however: both the audience and the earth are concept as well as matter. Ant, actant, actor or actor-network theory: the movements of the excellent performers Marcela San Pedro, Lena Schattenberg, Carla Rihl, Jianan Qu, Irwan Ahmett and Claudia Bosse go through any and all associations with the three letters and head for the predetermined breaking points between the execution and limitation of movements with utmost precision. They thus explore what Latour described as the nodes of action and being acted upon: action and movement are not active counterparts to being passively acted upon and moved. Acting and moving are only the – more or less active – responses to being acted upon and moved. Acting is re-acting on surroundings and conditions, acting is something you let yourself be carried away into doing, and above all: acting is not a privilege of the human body. This is why the bodies of the performers move in an aesthetic that does not bring out what’s inside but aesthetically processes the nodes and nebulous boundaries of the inside and the outside. The audience is physically close to the performers, and the boundary between stage and auditorium has given way to a mixed state in which the performers cannot be observed from a safe distance. Their breathing under difficult conditions synchronises with the breathing of the spectators. The air in the room is a shared resource and must suffice for everyone. The thought alone can throw your own breathing out of whack. And when there is just about enough air in Tanzquartier Wien, the ground becomes shaky. Several layers open up and make migrating movements in the room necessary. Some carry their “own” piece of earth in bags like the ones used for flooding. Even as a seat and a cushion, the bags provide only a moderate “comfort zone”. Later, this effect becomes even more pronounced when they are carried around the room by individuals: the ice floe melts away underneath the polar bear’s feet, and the audience in Tanzquartier walk aimlessly with their “own” bag of earth through the room, which will probably not be enough in the long run and gives little joy if you live on it by yourself, anyway. Some put it away immediately, others seem to cling to it (or vice versa). The “attachments” probably go both ways.
Wounded landscapes cause wounds to other landscapes, to bodies, to discourses. Not only do they make physical movement necessary, they also demand new thinking and survival strategies that are precarious rather than permanent. At any rate, they will have to “embed” thinking more markedly in its necessary environments. “I often fall in love with wounded landscapes; landscapes that are scary because violence has been done to them”, it says at one point in the text. “They are environments of ecological catastrophes; but they make me calm, they fascinate me, they make me awake.” In the spirit of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, this is an attempt to make interconnections conceivable and perceivable that we have only guessed at so far: “The time has come”, says Tsing, “for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. […] How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?”[1]
Andrea Seier is a professor of cultural history of audiovisual media at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses include a micropolitical perspectivisation of audiovisual media, media technologies of the self, theories of precarity (concern, passivity, vulnerability), issues of class, and gender media studies.
[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton/Oxford 2015, p. vii-viii.
In the book, Tsing explores what she calls “third nature”, i.e. what manages to go on living in deserted, wounded, depleted landscapes.