Bianca Mendonça

LandScaping 0.4 / To the ones who've been before

05.11.2022 at 19:00 and 06.11.2022 at 18:00 - TanzFaktur Cologne

How can the experience of being part of a living environment be passed on? In LandScaping 0.4 / To the ones who've been before, choreographer Bianca Mendonça, dancer Marília Silva and dramaturg Valerie Wehrens accumulate multiform traces of the Atacama Desert.

If we engage in understanding the desert itself as a living being, what relationship with our fellow world can emerge? In this choreographic installation, the basement of the TanzFaktur becomes a walkable landscape underground. In it, the three collaborators share concrete memories and sonic, textual, physical, scenographic approaches to this mode of reference while experimenting with principles of installative choreography.

Mendonça spent three weeks with her research partners Timm Roller and Constanza Ruiz Campusano in the communities around San Pedro de Atacama. The encounters with wind, aridity, shiny mineral salts, Andean cosmovision, sand, time, lithium mining companies, heat, and living mountains are considered bodies of knowledge by the group. Through installative objects and choreographic sequences, the team of LandScaping 0.4 / To the ones who've been before develops various relationships to memories and records created on site.

Mendonça's choreographic work is driven by an ongoing search for viable forms of relationship to the landscape in which human perceptions can decenter and form fusing sensibilities and hybrid modes of existence.

With LandScaping 0.4 / To the ones who've been before, the Brazilian, Cologne-based choreographer continues her series of artistic experiments on South American landscape and its colonial traces. From 2020-21, she created a first trilogy of works following an artist residency in the Brazilian Amazon. In it, she processed questions about cartography, differences between experienced, remembered, and imagined landscape, and our ways of relating to Amazonian cosmology. In her new collaboration, Mendonça deepens her exploration of choreographic formats in which concrete landscapes become tangible to the audience as complex, walkable co-worlds.

Landscape: Bianca Mendonça, Marília Silva, Valerie Wehrens | Choreography: Bianca Mendonça | Dance and Co-Choreography: Marília Silva | Text: Valerie Wehrens | Technical direction and lighting: Roman Sróka | Costume and set: Margareta Bartelmeß | Sound research: Timm Roller | Sound editing: Heinrich Lenz / Research partner: Constanza Ruiz Campusano | Communication and PR: Anthea Petermann | Transcription interviews: Carla Tampier Jara | Fotos: Alessandro De Matteis.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste and Kulturamt der Stadt Köln. Supported by tanzhaus nrw, by TanzFaktur Köln and Tanzresidenz 2022 im Quartier am Hafen.