OBSIDIANA, ESTRANHA, ERÓTICA E ULTRAVIOLETA: Sall Lam Toro
IPAF & Managing Discomfort presents: OBSIDIANA, ESTRANHA, ERÓTICA E ULTRAVIOLETA by Sall Lam Toro
Live performance rework from Obsidian Dream Love Letters series (2023)
The live performance piece “obsidiana, estranha, erótica e ultravioleta” (2024) is a rework of the multimedia installation performance Obsidian Dream Love Letters series (2023) universe of surrealist ecoerotic poetics of queer blackness, archiving and rituals situated in multi-cosmologies of space. The previous version was developed for Close Encounters: Embodied Journeys festival co-produced by Danshallerne and Den Frie Udstillingsted Bygning and curated by Julienne Doko last year. And the multimedia installation was also shown at Fear and Fauna group exhibition curated by Ariel Feminisms ending with another performance version as well at the finissage. Drawing upon a love letter to black ecoerotic consciousness built upon universes of phantasmagoria, the space is inhabited by sculptures, light and soil companions. The piece materializes manifestos of atemporal and multidimensional fugitivity with the support of sensuous rituals channeled by the presence of obsidian and rose quartz raw living bodies within the sculptures and soil trails.
In this rework without video nor mapped visuals, the scenographic space shifts into a green, ultraviolet light glitch, concentrated immersing space with an assemblage of two poles and sculptures-podium of obsidian and rose quartz leveled onto them. The performers not only move backwards in different positions grounded on the floor in possession-like modes as the previous version, but also lift their own bodies up supported by the pole moving upside down in twists and distorted body positions. This version contrasts with the previous ones offering a heightened physicality of the performative with an abundant hypererotic descent into the sensuous vibrational frequencies of obsidian and rose quartz.
Notes for audience
TBA
Double Bill: This performance is a DOUBLE BILL showing with Martin O’Brien. 1 ticket = access to 2 performances.
Language
Non-Verbal
Access
Husets Teater does not have level free access and is not equipped with stairlifts, and is therefore not accessible for wheelchair users. We recognise that this is not good enough.
Credits
Concept, development, artistic direction, performance, & choreography: Sall Lam Toro
Co-development, co-performance, & co-choreography: Suziethecockroach
Choreography consultant & assistance: Tabatha Araujo
Sound composition: Warren Jones
Sound remixing: Suziethecockroach
Sculpture work: Sall Lam Toro
Scenography and light design: Bella Jensen
Costume design: Serena Coelho
Additional re-styling: Sall Lam Toro and Suziethecockroach
About the artists:
Sall is a black trans queer unbinary antidisciplinary multimedia performance artist and organizer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and, born and raised in Portugal to immigrant parents from Guiné-Bissau. They work with the mediums of performance, movement, sound, textual and visual art. Their work relates to claiming the ecoerotic as a way into decolonizing body(ies) while finding strategies to create more accessibility to multiple, non-linear, poetic universes of the sensual through equally disruptive, emotional and dissident forms.
Their pieces strive to break with/interrupt the consequences of coloniality-based inherited violence and oppression in the becoming of the body through rituals, economies of care and the senses while establishing intentional relationships with grief and death.
Their interactive and collaborative visual works indulge within meta-universes of meaning, body and spirit erupting shifting transcendental states within the body of the viewer/participant attempting to defy capitalist modes of operating and sensing.
They are part of (Co)Opulence, and Humus Collectives working mainly in Denmark and Scandinavia.
OBSIDIANA, ESTRANHA, ERÓTICA E ULTRAVIOLETA is co-presented with TOASTER and Live Art DK and also a part of their Managing Discomfort Performance Festival.
OBSIDIANA, ESTRANHA, ERÓTICA E ULTRAVIOLETA is part of IPAF: an international festival for contemporary performance presenting artists from different cultural contexts, whose work engages identity politics, sexual expressions, and body representations, facilitated by Warehouse9.
The festival is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the City of Copenhagen and Bispebjerg Lokaludvalg.
AN AMBULANCE TO THE FUTURE (THE SECOND CHANCE): Martin O’Brien
IPAF & Managing Discomfort presents: An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance) by Martin O’Brien
The grim reaper stood there, finally I saw him. His skeletal form sparkled in the moonlight and nothing else existed. This was the deal. He reached out and wrapped his cold, bone hand around my skull. I was lost in the darkness of his cape. He drew me near and kissed me. He tasted like death, and I loved it.
In ‘An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance)’, Death pays a man for sex. The price is immortality.
Mixing video, live performance action and parables, the work paints the picture of life lived over and over again, a life that doesn’t need water or oxygen, a life without the promise of an end point. It is a meditation on endings and new beginnings. With his usual intensity and wit, this work continues Martin O’Brien’s explorations of the politics of death by asking what the idea of immortality can help us understood about being mortal.
‘An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance)’ premiered at Whitechapel Gallery in May 2023 and was presented as part of Martin O’Brien’s year as ‘Writer-in-Residence’.
Notes for audience
An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance) contains nudity, footage of scrotal piercing, discussion of sex and death and spanking.
Double Bill: This performance is a DOUBLE BILL showing with Sall Lam Toro. 1 ticket = access to 2 performances.
Language
English
Access
Husets Teater does not have level free access and is not equipped with stairlifts, and is therefore not accessible for wheelchair users. We recognise that this is not good enough.
The text that Martin O’Brien will be performing in English will be available as limited quantity handouts at the venue.
Credits
Lead artist: Martin O’Brien
Producer: FUTURE RITUAL
Videography: Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi
Performers (Live): Zack Mennell
Performers (Film): Ali Campbell, Ash McNaughton, Carolyn Naish, Ewan Hindes, Pianka M, Regina Jay
About the artists:
Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. He is Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery throughout 2023. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television. Martin O’Brien is currently senior lecturer in Live Art at Queen Mary University of London
An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance) is co-presented with TOASTER and Live Art DK and also a part of their Managing Discomfort Performance Festival.
An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance) is part of IPAF: an international festival for contemporary performance presenting artists from different cultural contexts, whose work engages identity politics, sexual expressions, and body representations, facilitated by Warehouse9.
The festival is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the City of Copenhagen and Bispebjerg Lokaludvalg.
