CAVES-3
Aubrey Birch
On 9 and 10 December, Aubrey Birch will perform CAVES-3 at K1. In an immersive performance - during which you can feel free to lie down - the writer, poet and performer reinterprets the allegory of the cave. Starting from the present and everyday, audience and performer descend into the past and future, to our geological roots. To the stone in our bones, the iron in our blood and the salt in our sweat...
Aubrey Birch is Australian and lives in Berlin. CAVES-3 is the third performance in a series about underground microcosms. The performance was developed at a.pass, an artistic research environment that focuses on performativity and scenography.
"The last in a three-part series into underground microcosms, CAVES-3 is an immersive performance and spatialisation of a mineral erotics. Developed at a.pass in Brussels, the research takes as its starting points cybernetics, alchemy and mysticism. Rereading the allegory of the cave as a transcendence that goes not up and away from the body but down to its geological roots, CAVES-3 finds a politics in the stone of our bones, iron in our blood and salt in our sweat. The images on the wall are not simulacra but traces of those who came long ago, who returned to the same place over thousands of years, far longer than a single life. Beginning on the surface in a personal world, whose stories are inseparable from its soil, plants and animals, we descend into a mineral matrix that connects the long and the short time, the expanded and the local, our everyday world and something wholly other. By entering, by inscribing into the space our breath, our flesh, our basic presence, we expose ourselves not only to the past but to those who come next. We need that intimacy with the future to give us energy in the here and now, so we can return to the surface and act." -Aubrey Birch
Credits:
A project written, composed & performed by Aubrey Birch
Audio production: Charlie Usher
Scenography: Marzia Dalfini & Sabrina Seifried
Lighting: Ofer Smilansky
Choir: Beatrice Bonino & Sara Leghissa
Support and co-production: a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies), KANAL-Centre Pompidou, S P I N vzw.
