PERFORMANCE
Sharona Florsheim
CRINOLINES
Live performance
13. 7. 2023, 19:30
Franz Kafka sq., Prague 1
Crinolines is a dance performance by Sharon Florsheim adapted for realization at Palackého Square in Prague. The work captures the encounter of a moving body with a rigid crinoline. Voluminous crinoline dresses, fashionable in the 19th century, can serve as a metaphor for the social constraints characteristic of communication through digital networks at the expense of physical contact, which has been further intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic. With its lattice-like structure, the crinoline acts as an extension of the living body, altering its physical dimensions, limiting freedom of movement, and possibilities for intimacy. It is a social construct that, despite being highly restrictive, was widely prevalent and fashionable in its time. The metal structures, weighing up to 20 kilograms, often prevented wearers from passing through doors or sitting down and occasionally even caused unfortunate accidents resulting in the death of their owners. As the dancers navigate the physical dictates, the performance reflects human psychology - strategies of acceptance, resistance, and playfulness, each creating a specific emotional and physical world.
Sharona Florsheim is a choreographer, artistic director, and cultural producer based in Israel. In her choreographic work, Florsheim combines complex structures of improvisation and stage material, creating a unique and compelling style of work. Florsheim undermines existing power structures while exploring human expressions of freedom, presence, and immediate decision-making. She emphasizes relationships formed in real-time between space, performers, and the audience, creating immersive and inclusive dance performances and events. Sharona has created five full-length productions, and her work has been presented in Europe, Africa, and regularly in Israel. Some of her recent works created for both stage and public spaces include: Crinolines (2021), The One Hand Sound (2017), Fragile Formation (2016), Noa's Secret of Infinity (2015), Connectivity Practices (2014), The Big Game (2012), among many others.
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The performance is sponsored by the Israeli Embassy.
Yoryos Styl & Katerina Kasidiari
FIRST CONTACT
Live stream performance (reservation only)
13. 7. 2023, 20:00
Stone Bell House, Prague City Gallery, Staroměstské sq. 13, Prague 1
Even though Chat GPT is just a relatively limited AI project with a big margin for error, it already has a vast impact on our daily lives. First Contact is a project that takes current AI advances to the next level. What if... we had constant communication with it? What will life be like in the future where AI in a human form will be part of our daily routine? Will the choice of not using its services have an impact on our social status? These are some of the questions that a team of Greek authors is focusing on through simulating the experience of encountering a personal AI assistant. The First Contact performance was first presented at the Fringe Festival in Thessaloniki and will be live streamed for the Re-connect Art visitors.
Yoryos Styl (Concept, Co-ordinator, Artistic environment creator, Performer) presently located in Athens, is a multifaceted individual who dons the hats of an actor, performer, director, scriptwriter, conceptual artist, photographer, programmer, and voyager. He graduated from the Athens Conservatory’s Drama Academy and pioneered the development of Improv-Acting, which amalgamates improvisation with traditional acting techniques. In addition, he designed the YO (Why? Ohhh) Performing/Healing method, an interdisciplinary art that doubles as a personal growth practice. Yoryos established theatrical/performing companies such as Inside Spaceman, Kaleidoscope 4, Ek Paradromis, Gallactica, Why not? and Kiniks and contributed to various theatrical productions and films. On occasion, he collaborates with other artists to produce his own creations. As an esteemed Associate Artist of the DUENDE international performing company, he endeavours to unite the modern way of life, technology, and the fundamental aspirations of humanity, representing who we genuinely are rather than who we think we are or aspire to become. Yoryos continuously strives to expand his horizons by incorporating new perspectives, creating innovative art-forms, and broadening his repertoire of artistic expressions.
Katerina Kasidiari (Performer) initially found herself immersed in the realm of dance at the age of 14, embarking on a journey that would see her attend a multitude of contemporary dance classes. It took her several years to come to the realization that her truest form of expression lay in the realm of improvisation, a revelation that coincided with her longing for a creative outlet that
diverged from the confines of conventional academic institutions. With an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, she furthered her education by participating in workshops encompassing voice techniques, instant composition, choreography, drama, and photography. Presently, she resides in Athens, where over the past four years, she has crafted a number of captivating physical theatre performances. Her artistic endeavours have graced the stages of various prestigious festivals, including the LEGS Athens Art Performance Festival (2022), the Handmade and Recycled Theatre Festival (2019, 2021), and the Tanzahoi International Dance Festival (2021), where her works have been presented or projected, captivating audiences with their sheer brilliance.
Chloé Burkiewicz a Léo Hivert:
LOST UNDER HEAVEN
Live performance
13. 7. 2023, 20:30
Stone Bell House, Prague City Gallery, Staroměstské sq. 13, Prague 1
Lost Under Heaven is a new intermedia experiment of two French-born, Prague-based artists: painter and visual artist Chloé Burkiewicz also known as Catastrophe Existentielle and sharp sound designer and DJ Léo Hivert. Theirs is ethereal, ambient and drone music with live vocals including poetry of failure, desire and despair. The actual performance is a ritual that uses paintings and objects as well as ceramic sculptures to create a special setting intended to guide the audience through the different stages of the audiovisual experience. The soundscapes evolve from soft to cathartic, then the text breaks up and transforms again. It is an escape from fear of the future which in the end transforms into acceptance of reality. The ritual ends with a collective unity where everything makes sense and everything comes to join the other.
Chloé Burkiewicz is a French born painter and poet. She creates poetry using archives as a new language of the indicible. Also known as Catastrophe Existentielle, she has extended her practice and developed her new project using raw and uncompromising imagery and performing her poetry in collaboration with musicians incorporating intermedia, editions and installation.
Léo Hivert AKA The Undertaker’s Tapes is a French-born and currently Prague-based, hard-hitting, sharp sounding EBM/industrial/noise producer, sound-designer, DJ and a member of the Prague based collective Wrong. Released his debut album on Area Z records, his following Autolysis album came out on Wrong, and now he has an upcoming production on Modular Mind as well as a recent remix for Qual on X-IMG.
Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya:
UNVOICED TERRITORIES
Live performance
14. 7. 2023, 18:30
Cell no. 17, Hořejší embankment, Prague 5
The project explores the phenomenon of intersubjectivity of voice in the relationship between the Belarusian language, traditional singing and its digital sound reproduction by Artificial Intelligence, where digitalisation is connected with the idea of digital memory of the past and is a reaction to long-term language discrimination that leads to its disappearance.
The artist teaches AI to sing Ukrainian and Belarusian traditional songs based on publicly accessible online archives. Through collective acoustic singing and a choir with AI, she creates groping, in-between spaces that represent invisible perspectives and register the dislocated, excluded, and suppressed voices of people who were forced to live in their “homes”. Using the intersubjectivity of voice, she attempts to create a space of resonance where different entities listen to each other, communicating their languages in a call and response duet. Similar to movement, it passes through and out of individual bodies, as well as between bodies, spaces and borders and encircle them while tracing them. From the present to its representation, from “real time” to deferred time, from the living to the (in)animate in digital spaces.
Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya is a visual artist from Belarus, based in Prague and Berlin. She works with installation-based performances and co-creates spaces that often provoke or enable interaction with participants. Her projects are based on thorough field research that includes trips and interviews, interactions with people, and body practices and experiments such as non-verbal communication, collective sleeping sessions, etc. Using various materials and processes, she creates in-between spaces and places of connection.
Markéta Kinterová
WE ARE PUBLIC SPACE
Performative walk
15. 7. 2023 17:30
Stone Bell House, Prague City Gallery, Staroměstské sq. 13, Prague 1
The purpose of the performative walk for the public is to create conditions for a new way of experiencing and becoming aware of public space, which would enable a deeper focus on the quality of experience. Through an experimental artistic practice, the author aims to reverse the ‘recipient’ position of participants in public space into the position of those who are aware of their feelings and insights, can articulate them, and can become the creators of its form or provide individualized feedback on the newly built projects in the category of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in Prague. These places are a kind of tangible preview of the future, as they have accumulated a huge amount of capital and commitment to a progressive approach to space, which can also be viewed critically or from multiple perspectives.
Markéta Kinterová focuses on conceptual photography, often with overlaps into public space. Her book What You See is What You Think was published in 2020 by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (NAMU) as an artistic part of her dissertation entitled Oppositional Reading of Public Space, which she defended at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague in 2019. Since 2016 she has been the head of the Studio of Documentary Photography at FAMU. She has had a number of solo and group exhibitions. She is the editor-in-chief of the Fotograf magazine and the artistic director of the eponymous association that runs the Fotograf Gallery and the Fotograf Festival. In 2020–2022 she organized similar performative walks called Eyes Wide Open for the City in a number of cities in the Czech Republic and Germany (Tábor, Prague, Leipzig, Pardubice, and Brno).
Petra Pětiletá
SCREENERS
Performative lecture
16. 7. 2023 20:00
Operating building of the National theatre, Václav Havel sq., Praha 1
The Screeners is an educational project that comments on the phenomenon of the digital world and the way that adolescents perceive it. The research is based on the “art as research method” authored by Florian Dombois. Later on, during the author’s work, the method became the foundation for educational research with students during art classes and for the insights gained through research assignments for students. One of the most important findings is that Generation Z (digital natives) approaches life in today’s hybrid world in a comprehensive manner and does not separate its two components – the digital and the physical world, which we reflected upon separately in the research – in their real life. We are looking into two mirrors: a digital one and a physical one. Which one makes us like ourselves better?
Mothers Artlovers
PARENT-CON-ACTION
Series of live performances
18. 7. 2023 15:00
Operating building of the National theatre, Václav Havel sq., Praha 1
A fusion of a small parent festival of Kača Olivová's performance with a workshop on recording corporeality by Hana Hillerová. How does our artistic production change with the acquired parental experience? A festival by parents, for parents, for children and for everyone.
Guy Bar-Amotz
R.U.R. part II
Live performance
20. 7. 2023 19:00
Theatre X10, Charvátova 39, Prague 1
Automatism and freedom; participation in civil society; spontaneity and social architecture - these are the concerns that artist Guy Bar-Amotz brings to a new unconventional adaptation of R.U.R. – the play (1920) that coined the term ‘robot’. Guy’s distinctive approach to art is integrated into this piece developed in collaboration with theatre maker, writer, playwright, academic and journalist from Italy Armando Rotondi and computer scientist Piers O’Hanlon through performers wearing mech-animated talking robot masks. Live motion comes into imaginative fusion with living sculpture, spatial sound, son-et-lumière stagecraft and interactive programming.
Since 1996, Israeli-born/London-based artist Guy Bar-Amotz (1967) has been experimenting with complex systems featuring intertwined computing systems, installations, performance, sculpture and sound, tackling different aspects of participation and building a dialogue between artists, performers and audiences. Ever since his early works, his intention has been the physical formation of data, ideology and concepts. His latest robot installations focus on the given and existing meanings. The robots run pre-written scripts about their own existence. They are a reflection or even repetition of humans. They have the potential of being used as replacement humans. The artist subverts the meaning and even destroys the reality of the context in which they have been made, releasing the robots from their ties. The same physical ties that restrain us, humans, in our everyday existence.
Armando Rotondi is a playwright, director and practitioner whose work is focused on immersive and interactive performances, combining game and artistic experiences. He was a member of Lacuna Lab, a Berlin-based collective of artists interested at the intersection between arts, science and technology. Currently, he is interested in micro-theatre, and transmedia and alternative storytelling.
He is Full Professor in Performance Theory and Story-Telling and Director of the MA Programme in Creative Performance Practice at the Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Liverpool John Mooes University. His works have been staged, produced and exhibited internationally in countries such as Italy, UK, Spain, Australia, Poland, Canada, and Hong Kong. He is currently based in Spain.
The artist-in-residency program of the Re-connect Art festival in 2023 was implemented thanks to financial support of the European Union through the National Recovery Program and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Tereza Kerle feat. Tomáš Kerle
Divine Matrix
Live performance
23. 7. 2023 20:30
Kampus Hybernská, Hybernská 4, Prague 1
Tereza Kerle conceptualizes the virtual body of society in relation to the energy field. We are currently experiencing a stage of acceleration in the evolution of humanity as both a species and a spiritual community. The transcendence of humanity at the level of the energy field is taking place through awareness and connection to one’s own being and to other parts of the greater whole. It is community and communion that connects us to the energy flows of the planetary system. While energy is outside space and time, and is not an easily graspable, tangible evidence of the changes being experienced, the transformation is manifested in the mental field that transcends the personal plane and therefore responds more flexibly to these changes. Matter is slower, but changes take place on this plane as well.
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Tereza Kerle is a performer, a visual and sound artist, a dramaturge, a mindfulness guide and Dzogchen yogi. Recently she has also been involved in land art and garden design in the public space. Tereza uses a variety of tools and techniques (from sound and installation to gardening and ikebana to fire art and Butoh dance), but her artistic approach can be summarized as site-specific. She approaches the site with particular sensitivity and interest in order to find out its past and present, its strengths and problems, and then she decides what artistic means to use.
Tereza’s mission is to help guide and connect humanity to the higher realms of consciousness. From fear, co-dependency and insecurity to unconditional Love, abundance and freedom.
Ba:zel feat. KittyChaosPlanet
WE
Live stream performance
23. 7. 2023, 21:00
Kampus Hybernská, Hybernská 4, Prague 1
The album We is a response to the frenzy; the rage against powerlessness, domination, human stupidity and to the absolute lack of interest. Through eight tracks, it observes the state of our current world while looking into the future with a strange, almost surreal detachment. We live in a world of separateness and paralysis. The horrors of our world are within our reach, instantly recognisable and yet seen through the patina of social media and dubious journalism. Housing is unaffordable, yet our cities are overrun with sloppy Airbnb tourists, and the lungs of our planet are on fire. We are taking land and consuming precious water to raise animals just to satisfy our lust for meat. Consequently, we throw away tons of food while most of our planet is starving. This world is paranoid, sceptical and pessimistic. And it is imprinted on us whether we like it or not. WE is a kind of response to this imprint and an attempt to find hope and a perspective.
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Ba:zel is a shamanistic duo formed by Ewelina Vlček Chiu and Daniel Vlček. Active since 2014, the duo has traversed a number of unique genres, including experimental ASMR-electropop (eye draw(y) the line LP), neoclassical dark-wave (Scene 7 EP) to witch-wave (WE LP). The project features Daniel on drum pad, drum machine, bass and vocals and Ewelina on synth, soprano flute and vocals. Over the years, ba:zel have managed to strike a balance between dark, heavy bass and beats and soaring, emotionally charged vocals. In addition to touring extensively in Europe and Canada, ba:zel have worked with countless artists, performers and filmmakers. Their second full-length album, WE was released on Prague-based label XION in late 2022 and is a manifesto for troubled times. Written before the pandemic, but released after, WE tells the story of a world on fire.
VestAndPage
FUTURA SPAGYRICA
Live stream performance
28. 7. 2023, 20:30
Stone Bell House, Prague City Gallery, Staroměstské sq. 13, Prague 1
VestAndPage were invited to Re-connect Art 2023 as artists-in-residence under a Prague Biennale Foundation programme to conceive a new site-specific project. The final project is futura spagyrica, a multimedia installation spanning eight chambers of the cellar in Prague’s Stone Bell House from the 13th century. The imaginary alchemic itinerary unfolds as a transcorporeal journey into the human body, with each room dedicated to an organ or an element of the human body. In its under-skin hospitality, micro- and macrocosms entwine, their interconnectedness dissolving the inner-outer boundaries of bodies, mainly composed of void and space, and therefore permeable, transmittable and porous. In this meditative journey at the threshold of what is not ordinarily seen, VestAndPage invite visitors to reflect on and trace possible ways to heal today’s collective body in dis-ease.
They have conceived futura spagyrica as a structural cluster inspired by ancient alchemic medicine preparation methods. The eight cellar chambers encompass two sections: spa – that which divides, separates and draws out – containing the brain, bones, eyes and vocal cords; and ageiros – that which unites, combines and gathers – comprising the heart, lungs, blood, spirit and skeleton. The route views the cellar exhibition site as an anatomic itinerary, embracing the human and the non-human, form and space, and the cells of the collective body. VestAndPage assume that space emerges from the interrelation between objects, structures and actions, suggesting an embryonic dynamic theory of space that considers the relational context in which space is constituted. As a result of both visible and invisible exchange processes, symbiotic coexistence occurs on the body levell.
German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage in performance art and filmmaking since 2006. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their art practice is contextual and focuses on art’s liminal, spectral and ritual nature. In their recent artistic research, VestAndPage correlate the activity of agent pathogens within the human body as a resource of knowledge linked to the context of the resilience of a body when one of the symbionts becomes toxic. Examining the interactions between a body and the pathogens dwelling inside it, they define performatively potential scenarios of the relationship between the body and co-bodies/forms of life. In their live performances, video and film work, they look at reality through the lens of a queer ecology to deconstruct the presumed inside-outside binary. Their recent works explore the ongoing mediatisation and digitalisation of the biological through phenomenological research, examining the layers of the real presence and virtual representation of living agents inside the human body. They look specifically at how the paramount reality of a hospitalised body or any life-body studied in a laboratory expands into and reflects onto the digital and virtual realm. They unfold narratives that bring notions of self, loss and healing into unknowable spaces, stimulating impulses that may lead to ongoing transformation.
The artist-in-residency program of the Re-connect Art festival in 2023 was implemented thanks to financial support of the European Union through the National Recovery Program and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic