Ephemeral Archives is a ritual performance using sculptures, dance, and audience participation to explore questions and experiences of grief. This research is grounded in explorations of materiality and its sensorial repercussions, explored within a ritual framework which calls the audience into relationship with the materials, their loss, and the present-absences within the space.
What happens when we invite those things that “are not there” (in a corporeal way) to inhabit and work alongside us? What is the power of these invitations themselves? How can new possibilities be considered and materialized through invitation? Ephemeral Archives is a moment to sit with and expand into the questions, the uncertainties, maybe even an indeterminacies, together.
The main practice of invitation is through the vessel work. These clay sculptures are material invitations for the present-absences to join the artistic work crafted through form and space-making. Whether shaped into a nest or branching tree, the clay is patiently but perceptibly dedicated to change. It dries out in air and hydrates in water. Clay is clearly always becoming.
From this practice has spawned a series of choreographic scores which draw on the sensation of the clay. From the feeling of the drying clay on their skin the performers improvise a dance which draws from the movement of sculpting to explore how the human body can in its own way become a vessel for the non-corporeal. Part of the purpose of the dance is to situate the invitation as a temporal act, which is to say an act that is always in process. Nothing is, things are always becoming.
Ephemeral Archives is a search for ways to be with the material, sensorial-emotional, and spiritual realities of loss without the need to instrumentalize morning. At the heart of it is a paradoxical question: What is only possible when we are not trying to do anything? How can we understand the ontological and epistemological effects of lingering patiently with grief? What new possibilities open when we stop waiting for something to happen and attend to what is? Through a tactile exploration of clay and sensorially driven movement scores, Ephemeral Archives asks how to be in a world as it comes undone. As systems collapse with horrible, deadly repercussions how to we find communion with the living and the absent towards an expansive ability to hold this world and entities within it precious?
This project was made possible with support from Balkonscènes Fond, and DOOResidency.
