undercover
This work literally begins with a huge cloth, pliable and resistant. A surface, then, which will cover all features, hinder any movement, and separate the concealed from the revealed. But also, a surface for you to find shelter under, take new shapes through, self-withdraw behind, sustain your integrity by.
Rather than as the disclosing of form and meaning, undercover advocates choreography as an active ”concealment” in both a literal and a metaphoric sense. The project argues for the gesture of art, not only as the re-covering of the forbidden, segregated, or otherwise repressed, but also, and perhaps most importantly, as the language chosen by the uncompelled recondite. Thereby also recognizing the act of non-disclosure as a political strategy by choice.
The project refers to the concept of fold as formulated by philosopher Gilles Deleuze through his reading of Leibniz and baroque aesthetics. Fold stands here for the turning of surface onto itself, whereby surface exposes a virtual ”internal” depth, not by ”unfolding” itself, rather by surrendering to the ”revealing powers of the chiaroscuro of light”.
undercover is one hour long, repeated four times per day, one hour after the other. Audiences are welcomed to attend just one hour, or stay for as long as they wish.
Performed by Anja Arnquist, Philip Berlin, Louise Dahl, Samuel Draper, photography Dajana Lothert
undercover unfolds:
the exhibition cloth.00
the installation cloth interactive
cloth.00
Choreography is not translatable, but easily transferred onto other bodies, shapes, materiality, and fields. That’s the very prerogative of the pattern in motion.
cloth.00 allows choreography to reinvent itself into things/images whereby it loses one appearance from another. Piles of soaps, rugs in a heap, skin like rubber in abundance, films from above, photos from underneath, and a huge cloth, all stating the iterability of the gesture of art. From the concept to a body, to a projection, to a thing, and back to the concealed. Layer upon layer of transpositions, each layer turning choreography into something else, whilst allowing it to remain the same. Projected, and revealed anew.
Finally, recognized as a repetition of the trans-(ap)parent, hanging from above, fully disclosed and yet the most concealing leafing of all.
performers on screen Emelie Johansson, Cilla Olsen
photography Håkan Larsson
film and editing Madeleine Lindh
first installed in 2013, this is the fifth edition of the exhibition
cloth interactive
A huge, black cloth is spread out on the floor. Unknown figures dance under the covers. The cloth hides their bodies and prevents all their movements, itself wrapping them tightly, rippling its own flat surface into unimaginable shapes. Under the cloth, dancing is an intimate, tactile, skin to surface experience. Anyone who watches from the outside, on the other hand, sees the rippling ocean of the cloth, and the clair obscure play of light much like in the draping of the Baroque. Spectacular, sometimes threatening images emerge, conveying something other than the dance that takes place beneath the surface. The underlying sensory sensation concealed and at the same time revealed anew. Visitors are encouraged to join the under-cover dancing. Under the cloth, deprived of oversight, they will perceive the limits of their contours, whilst we on the outside will sense the unlimited potential of form. Inside and outside interdependently diverging.
The installation directly refers to the art installation ‘All’ by Maurizio Cattelan.
performers/facilitators Anja Arnquist, Philip Berlin, Louise Dahl, Samuel Draper
premiered in 2011 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the piece has been performed extensively in various contexts and for audiences of all ages and kind