mut
mut found its point of departure in conversations with evelina regarding elements of jee chan's work harbor. watching recordings of jee's grandmother recounting her memories, evelina pente felt reminded of and began to recollect episodes from her own past.
in mut, evelina shares with us stories of her escape from war as a young child, which in turn translate to our own imaginations, refracted through the lens of our experiences. fragmentary and dissonant, these landscapes of memory take shape like composite maps mapping meandering topographies of living and dying in a senseless world.
the work finds its form as a long-durational performance installation in which the fluid and cyclical nature of memory is manifested.
concept / choreography and installation:
jee chan and stefan pente
in performance with: evelina pente
production management: agnes kern, tanzarchiv berlin
technical assistance: martin pilz
installation assistance: toni flügel
developed in co-production with Tanzfabrik Berlin and Tanzarchiv Berlin, mut is part of the project Archiv-Kompliz*innen – TanzArchive in Bewegung of Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin (ztb) e.V. | Supported by Bureau Ritter/TANZPAKT RECONNECT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR initiative, dance assistance program
presented at Tanzfabrik Berlin
as part of FOLD– Intersecting Memories
19 november 2022
circa
circa is primarily inspired by Evelina’s relationship with Zürich and how it transformed over the 54 years she lived there.
Evelina (b. 1938) and her young family were living in Dahle, (Sauerland, Germany) in 1962 when Evelina found a postcard depicting Zürich. The photograph was probably taken from St. Peter, looking down over the Limmat and the lake with the snow-covered Alps looming in the background.
At that very instant, she decided, that this was the place where she wanted to live. Evelina and her family arrived in Zürich in early 1964.
Soon after, her second child Stefan was born.
Our research engages with pressing cultural themes such as embodied knowledge, migration, intergenerational experience, and collective memory.
Evelina moved to Berlin in 2018, "returning to the place" where she was stranded as a refugee child in 1945.
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Evelina, who wanted to visit Zürich one last time with this project, passed away in January this year. She left with us stories and fragmentary tales, about her life in Zürich and the challenge to continue the project without her physical presence.
During our residency at Tanzhaus Zürich between August 19. and August 30. we tried to pick up some of her traces. We believe the importance of this project lies in its investigation of how places cease to exist even if they might physically still be there, and how memories are passed on between individual and societal bodies, thus allowing for alternative historiographies to emerge.
images from our 12 day residency at Tanzhaus Zürich