Dwelling no. 1: The body
- a 72 hour exposed inhabitation
With and by Nana Francisca Schottländer
Curated by Mads Nørgaard
12th of March 2015 12.00
to
15th of March 2015 12.00
at
Nørgaard Store, Strøget, Copenhagen.
Please Be Here Now is the first in a series of laboratory-pieces by and with Nana Francisca Schottländer. The pieces consist of exposed inhabitations of selected places and spaces that become settings for exploring relevant themes. The inhabitations are live, embodied discourses on different aspects of our way of being in the world.
In Please Be Here Now, the main theme of exploration is ‘the body’ – as private, public and artistic material.
Nana Francisca Schottländer lives for three days and nights, 72 hours, in the shop window of Nørgaard Store, in central Copenhagen shopping street, Strøget. She sleeps, wakes, brushes her teeth, thinks, eats, drinks, washes herself, reads – and writes about what is taking place, both on the surfaces of the space and her own body. She also receives selected guests and conducts conversations and performative actions with them.
And all the while she observes the passers-by as much as they observe her.
Thus the role of the spectator is challenged – for just as the body in the window creates images and tableaux simply by its presence, it also gazes back at the spectator, challenging the experience of the relation between spectator and piece, object and subject, giver and receiver. We receive each other for a moment and this exchange lingers on in our bodies.
With a real, vulnerable and non-manipulated body the performer gives the spectator the momentary option of a different bodily experience, the situation becoming a possible entrance into a shared moment.
The inhabitation explores themes such as a consumerist gaze versus a reciprocal gaze, mirroring, staging(s) of the self, vulnerability and the immediate bodily resonance and exchange arising between the performer and the people, passing by the window. It draws on theorists as Heidegger, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault as well as other writers and thinkers.
Please Be Here Now is not a concluded piece but rather a framed process of investigation; a symbiosis between staging, performance-research and participatory experience; it is basic research in performative situations and in what it means to be a human body confronted with other human bodies.
In Please Be Here Now, the main theme of exploration is ‘the body’ – as private, public and artistic material.
Nana Francisca Schottländer lives for three days and nights, 72 hours, in the shop window of Nørgaard Store, in central Copenhagen shopping street, Strøget. She sleeps, wakes, brushes her teeth, thinks, eats, drinks, washes herself, reads – and writes about what is taking place, both on the surfaces of the space and her own body. She also receives selected guests and conducts conversations and performative actions with them.
And all the while she observes the passers-by as much as they observe her.
Thus the role of the spectator is challenged – for just as the body in the window creates images and tableaux simply by its presence, it also gazes back at the spectator, challenging the experience of the relation between spectator and piece, object and subject, giver and receiver. We receive each other for a moment and this exchange lingers on in our bodies.
With a real, vulnerable and non-manipulated body the performer gives the spectator the momentary option of a different bodily experience, the situation becoming a possible entrance into a shared moment.
The inhabitation explores themes such as a consumerist gaze versus a reciprocal gaze, mirroring, staging(s) of the self, vulnerability and the immediate bodily resonance and exchange arising between the performer and the people, passing by the window. It draws on theorists as Heidegger, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault as well as other writers and thinkers.
Please Be Here Now is not a concluded piece but rather a framed process of investigation; a symbiosis between staging, performance-research and participatory experience; it is basic research in performative situations and in what it means to be a human body confronted with other human bodies.