…is a transdisciplinary research platform and collective for artistic and curatorial practices, launched by artist, curator and researcher Selma Boskailo and sound artist and composer Anders Ehlin. They use the term liquidity as a referential trampoline to facilitate speculation and porosity of borders as a means of artistic expression and the creation of alternative and/or potential scenarios. The collective is currently developing the project De-territorialized Listenings – an ongoing series of site-specific binaural soundwalks, reactive to participant’s body movements and locations, offering strategies for dismantling prevailing hegemonic sensorial and imaginative structures.

De-territorialized Listenings – Impulse

The New Liquidity will create a site-specific iteration of De-territorialized Listenings. Using adaptive spatial audio, which is reactive to the participant’s body movements and location, they seek to challenge a site’s historical and sociological layers by regrouping the sensorial and imaginative structures of the participants. By rethinking local knowledge and environments, they are proposing a transformation of familiar soundscapes, as well as addressing deterritorialization in the context of cultural globalization and distancing from the locality developed through mediatization, migration, and commodification of life under the global capital. For Metropolis, they would like to develop a participatory and collective choreographic aspect to create convergences of multiple narratives as well as the elevation and exchange of interactive agencies between the participants. Through technological focus and a pronounced participation related to walking, they want to create a choreography that inscribes the spatial trace of the moving body, thus hoping to reveal socio-political and poetic patterns within the larger societal realm as well as within a discrete group of people.

JULY RESIDENCY

Photo: Attila Balogh

Brida Horváth (HU/FR)

…is a dancer, performer and choreographer born in Hungary and living in France. She creates performances on and off stage. Butoh, especially the work of Masaki Iwana, has inspired her dance since 2012. At the center of her interests are subjects such as human-nature interrelationships, the state of abandonment, the transformation, and the ritual. Her questioning about the limits between the performing space and the audience, and the role of the spectator are reflected lately in her site-specific works. She leads regular dance and movement workshops for adults, youngsters and children.

Dawn (Entre chien et loup)
The project relies on the artistic practice of contemporary dance, butoh and walking, and it deals with the theme of transformation: the moment when the old does not exist anymore and the new has not yet taken form. In its final shape, it will be a solo dance performance (site-specific with a possible stage version). In its actual version, it takes the form of the combination of a participative walk (guided by simple instructions), a dance performance (inspired by the theme and location of the event) and a ritual. The event happens in a natural environment that can be found in the city, starting by night and finishing at the sunrise, and/or starting by the sunset and finishing in the night.

Photo: Nadim Elazzeh

Marika Hedemyr (SE)

…is a choreographer/artist who creates public art, choreography, and mixed reality experiences. She explores coexistence through the emotional and political relations between people and places. Her site-specific mixed reality walks combine documentary material, mobile-based augmented reality (AR) technology, and performative formats into an affective experience that tickles the audience’s imagination, heart, and thoughts. Currently based in Malmö.
www.marikahedemyr.com

Ashes to Ashes
At the Metropolis residency, Hedemyr will develop Ashes to Ashes, a new mixed reality walk for graveyards, an immersive experience that explores our co-existence with the planet earth. The conceptual starting point is that the smallest ingredients that make up our mobile digital devices – minerals and matter that come from the earth – are also the building blocks of our human body. In such a perspective, the human body and the phone are one. In the walk, the participants hold their phone in their hand and have headphones on. With care and respect for the location, Hedemyr explores ways in which a mixed reality performance could take place at a graveyard and be both an individual and a collective experience.

Photo: Nina Photography

Arbonauts (UK)

…are the artists Helen Galliano and Dimitri Launder, based in London. They create site-specific performance at the meeting point between theatre, installation and dance, with an experimental and collaborative core. Since 2012, they have been creating climate-responsive performances in unique spaces – from tunnel shafts to coastal paths – often working with community performers.
www.arbonauts.org

Residency project

In 2021, they were commissioned by Estuary Festival, Metal and Arts Council England to create SILT, a climate-responsive performance imagining how humans might evolve beyond an impending climate disaster and dwell in water. It was performed live at dusk in the water of a tidal pool in Essex by a group of community performers made up of open water swimmers. They are now working on a development of SILT for Estuary Festival 2025 – SALT – as well as a research project ‘How to Approach an Island’ looking at islands, ecology and site-specific work. They are looking forward to exploring the waterways and urban swimming culture of Copenhagen with Metropolis this summer.

Photo: Ana Colute

Aurélie Pertusot (FR)

…forges subjective links with the perception of space and time by transforming cultural landmarks. Focusing on social interactions and landscapes transitions, her research plays with absence and presence, instability and fragility to reflect an underlying reality. Her approach to public space is characterised by the use of architecture as a medium to create visual or sound compositions that reveal invisible spaces.

Residency project
Her intention is to enter into a dialogue with the site to focus on the transformation of the landscape and architecture’s echo. She will create an eco-instrumentation made of elements found on site to make a visual and sonic exploration of a resonant place with sand and hand-scrubbed objects on various surfaces to make the object’s wear and tear audible. Pertusot proposes a reflection on how to listen to and shape a territory, whether tiny or on the scale of the landscape and our environment.

Photo: Ars Electronica Festival

Saint Machine (RO)

…is an experimental artist and curator working with new media, combining interactive sculpture and performance. She is the author of immersive multimedia installations that use their observer to function. Her works investigate biological processes, proposing the idea of space seen as a living organism. These are organic physical sculptures with a digital animated core, testing the human willingness to cede one’s own physicality in exchange for digital content. In interacting with these light-emitting hybrid organisms, success in controlling them is always equivalent to willingness to allow oneself to be assimilated.

Residency project

This residency is an opportunity to deepen the themes explored in previous works and explore possible ideas for a project that might test ways to create a symbiotic relationship between human and the non-human. It could mean working with emotional residues left within urban spaces and their influence on the collective identity of the city and the possibilities to reflect this into a responsive light installation. A minimalist technological creature that could capture sunlight, amplify it and reflect it back into the city. Another idea would be to work with water and light and maybe environmental sound. The challenge would be to create a dynamic interaction with sunlight, potentially involving movable or responsive components that adapt to the changing position of the sun throughout the day and to integrate emotions of passersby into the project. The collected emotions could trigger variations in the intensity or frequency of the amplified sunlight, creating a dynamic interplay between the emotions of the public and the visual impact of the installation. The idea behind this possible project would be to contribute to the understanding of the intricate relationships between technology, humans, and the environment, both urban/constructed and natural. The residency will be a reflection on the co-existence of different elements within society, provoking viewers to consider their own roles within these shifting landscapes.

Top photo: Moni Wespi / Slowed Landscapes