Tanzquartier Wien

In what ways do we humans interact with the environment and with all the rest that makes up this world around us – organisms, plants, substances, landscapes? What are the effects? And how do they affect us? What is lost, what can be gained? Can we create new kinds of relationships? Which old and new stories could be told? How do artists from different disciplines talk about the entanglement of nature and culture? With On this Earth we will present and host outstanding artistic positions which engage in and enrich this controversial debate in ways that might only be achieved by artistic approaches.

Renowned European contemporary dancer and choreographer Vera Mantero will be starting off the line-up: Her solo work The Caldeirão Highlanders – Exercises in Fictional Anthropology is a clever composition of text, video, singing and dancing, which knows of no separation between poetry and science and was inspired by the likes of Antonin Artaud and John Cage. Next up, Gérald Kurdian’s queer and witty concert-meets-performance HOT BODIES – STAND UP will deal with gender politics and sexual desires in utopian concepts. Thus, by way of collaging, personal stories will mingle with texts by Donna Haraway and well-known eco-sex (sex with nature) advocate Annie Sprinkle. A post-apocalyptic scenery that involves a melancholic society dependent on oil will emerge from Kat Válastur’s choreography for three dancers OILinity, while Katrin Hornek’s lecture To be made up of the earth is not necessarily easy will search nature’s materiality for capitalist footprints by examining her own artistic practice. The past is a foreign country, by Jun Yang and Michikazu Matsune, will render visible the relationship between personal and political agencies in various topographic environments – sea, land and outer space. Finally, María Jerez’s sculptural performance Yabba will conclude this series of works by inviting us to a new, unknown cosmos – a world without sensible order but enlivened by entities undergoing constant metamorphosis.