LandScaping 0.1
Pathways & Crossroads
This site gives an insight into the Creative Process of LandScaping 0.1
LandScaping 0.1 consisted of two parts: a research about Amazonian landscape and the creation of the Performance Lecture LandScaping 01 – Mapping the places I have never been. I started LandScaping 0.1 with the intention of developing artistic-choreographic tools around the key idea of expanding the practice of Mapping as an artistic practice in relation to the Amazonian landscape. At the same time, I didn´t imagine that this research would drive me to a process of rethinking some notions of choreography and change my perspective in how to relate to performative arts.The research phase of LandScaping 0.1 took place from September 2020 to February 2021 between Germany and the region of Alto Tapajós (Upper Tapajós River) and Baixo Tapajós (Low Tapajós River) in Santarém, which ispart of the Brazilian Amazon. In this time, strongly influenced by the restrictions of the 2020 pandemic, a tension between the imagination of a place versus the tangible, physical experience of being in that place w emerged which shaped the practices of the research in two different ways:
1. mapping the Amazonian landscape through a process of research, imagination and dialogue with people from there - without being there.
2. mapping this landscape through the physical experience of the landscape and developing practices on-site.
Applying these two perspectives, I generated an archive of images, texts, impressions, sensations, videos and questions. This archive of Mapping of the landscape then became the basis for: LandScaping 0.2 and LandScaping 0.3.
August - September 2020 / Mapping the places I have never been
My research was supposed to begin in May 2020 with an artistic residency in Alter do Chão/Santarém, combined with a boat travel across the Amazon from Manaus (capital of the state of Amazonas) to Belém (capital of the state of Pará). The idea of this boat tour was to develop the practice of mapping not just in relation to a specific place but also as a trajectory.
With the postponement of the travel to October and the change of my travel route due to the Corona pandemic, a new possibility appeared: the idea of mapping this landscape without being there, based on the material available about this place. This became the theme and starting point for an artistic residency in September in the Quartier am Hafen in Cologne.
For this practice of mapping a place I have never been to, I was using open source data found on the internet, Google Maps, scientific and non-scientific texts as well as endless WhatsApp conversations with Kandyê Medina, my collaborator onsite.
what would I have eaten
if I had been there
which clothes would I have worn
if I had been there
how would have been the color of this quai
if I had been there
how hot would it have been
if I had been there
how cold would it have been
if I had been there
with whom would I have talked
if I had been there
which words would I have learnt
if I had been there
where would I have slept
if I had been there
how would I have moved
if I had been there
October - November 2020 – Santarém, Brazil
In October then I finally spent 6 weeks in the region of Santarém where I visited different locations like Alter do Chão, Tapajós National Forest (Tapajós river) and the Coroca Communities (the Arapiuns river) to develop practices that feed from my relationship with the landscape.
After the first weeks in which I developed the first Mapping practices, it became clear to me that a project of this nature needed to be much more about noticing, listening, being sensitive to the impulses conveyed by the nature and by the landscape. Rather than applying, practices that I had earlier developed a the dance studio in Germany in this landscape, the practices that came up during my research there were more about finding a common ground between the landscape and me. I learned the way that the landscape acts and moves: and I learned to listen to how it changes my perspective as an artist about my own work and about choreography. The question became not what I was supposed to do and create in this place, but what I could learn from this landscape?
For this reason, the research essentially produced a variety of physical practices of perception and ways of relating to this landscape. What I call Mappings are the documentations of these physical practices of perception in photo, video, text and (…) form. The Mappings are not just a register of experiences, but a bridge between the real experience of being in this place and the transformation of this experience into a choreographic approach.
During these practices of perception and my exchange with the local population, I started to perceive this landscape, the forest, the trees, and the river as living beings, or maybe saying, as choreographic beings. I worked on understanding and embodying the Amazonian Perspectivism* and learn to perceive the movement performed by the living agents of this landscape as choreographic. From this understanding of choreography, later in the project of LandScaping I created choreographic proposals that were inspired from this perspective of a living landscape-choreography.
While I was on site in the Amazon, I continued working together with the dancers Elsa Artmann, Anne-Lene Nöldner and Clara Müller and the dramaturg Constanze Schellow. Roots, Strange Bodies, Dancing Plants and Remembering, Telling and Moving were tasks that we were developing as group, growing between us a common artistic language.
On my lookout for strange bodies, I noticed above all that it depends on the perspective what I see as a potential strange body.From the human point of view, roads and cars and garbage cans and electric scooters in the forest are rather not strange bodies, but from the point of view of a tree or a deer?From the point of view of a tree, ivy on the trunk is certainly not so pleasant, or even life-threatening, but still "natural" - from the point of view of a forester it must be removed (at least that's how it looks).From a walker's point of view, a tree trunk on a walking path is like a strange body.
The research LandScaping 0.1 was finalized in February 2021 with the presentation of a reworked version of the Performance Lecture Mapping the Places I have Never Been – a dramaturgical collage about the memories of the research period in the Amazonian landscape.