GUT MATTERS

The artistic research of GUT MATTERS focusses on a thematic triad, combining bio-medical perspectives, feminist theory and neolithic archaeological materials with current perspectives onto trauma, disease, mental health and their connections to (physical, social, historical) metabolisms. 

This durational and sculptural performance is guided by three non-binary performers in space which are choreographically and aesthetically entangled, collaborating with a viscid liquid of unique qualities: non-newtonian fluid. Under (too much) pressure it gets stuck and in touch it produces collaborative movements. The performers make this fluid live on stage, forming ever-changing relations, constellations and images. Moving through the landscape as they create it, boundaries are dissolving, insides and outsides become inseparably entangled and the question of scale stays deliberately open, evoking poetic and political questions:

Considering the gut as a material and speculative gateway into the past, present and future, can we access our gut’s metabolisms and comprehensions and look at the excrements of our civilisation together? Can the gut, as a biological conduit, help us access, remember and invent choreographies of connection? What happens in a political environment where conventional ambitions for amelioration or repair lie gutted, where we cannot stomach the status quo anymore? Which relevant forms of relationality can be found via trans-historical research into neolithic Goddess figures, a fierce erotic fusion of life and death, earth, animal, plant, human and spiritual forces prior to the logics of empire? Which choreographic patterns and material movements can reveal itself from the study of these figures which is relevant for our current and future entanglements with the world?

Next to the live performance, the trans-disciplinary research questions around GUT MATTERS will be channeled into a publication, workshops/seminars, poster-maps and possibly also a VR/film experience.