- 13 Nov 2022 7 pm UTC
- dur 50 min
DIE LIKE A COUNTRY is a trans-disciplinary project curated by the internationally awarded artist Gemma Hansson Carbone. The project, which crosses different practices and sciences (walking, architecture, cartography, archeology, performing arts, anthropology and poetry), is structured around a text written by the contemporary author Dimitris Dimitriadis, and the figure of the Angelus Novus that Walter Benjamin described in his homonymous essay dated 1940.
DIE LIKE A COUNTRY is an intimate and radical walking performance implemented through a live digital guidance led by the artist through a serie of physical and virtual indications. The challenge is to create a hybrid experience of the different territories and landscapes we live in; our artistic research is based on this movement: the outside and the inside, the intimate and the political, you and me, digital and physical, voice and landscape, time and space. The key figure of this inevitable and natural dichotomy is the human body, and, in this context, the body inserted in a precise, historical and spatial dimension connected to a voice originating from a virtual meta-space. The audience is asked to connect their headset to an online live broadcasting, during the performance the walker will be guided through an immersive experience of her/his/their place following a special designed outdoor itinerary. The itinerary provided will define a general route conceived by the architect and PhD researcher Vasilis Mavrianos: a meta-map to be followed in every territory possible, constructing a network between virtual and physical geographies and creating a random constellation of sites, landmarks, urban events, positions, movements. Creating a contemplating community across different space and time dimensions.
DIE LIKE A COUNTRY aims to explore the relationship between the human being and the territory in which he/she/they live, designing what we define an “invisible architecture” made of memories, actions, perspectives, gazes, tools, findings, stories, fragments, random events. In this invisible architecture, we believe it’s possible to experience the manifestation of the Angelus Novus, like a Leonardesque annunciation that surprises us in the most unexpected place: on a street, a path on the mountain, in front of a museum or a bakery shop, at the edge of a square or at the beginning of the highway, or even in a kitchen, or a parking slot. The Angelus is the voice we hear in our head, a remote voice with a strange, unidentifiable accent who speaks something imponderable. It is here to tell us the historical era of a future past, recalling the last ruthless events of the country. And it exposes them with the meticulous scientificity of someone who has observed the unfolding of events outside the natural course of time.
DIE LIKE A COUNTRY is a punk-liturgical experiment designed to evoke the advent of the angel of history. History is immobile, it cannot go forward or backward, and it tells us what we have been through and what we will make happen. What we are. Where we are.
Gemma Hansson Carbone is an Italian – Swedish performer and theater director. She studied Theater and Stage Arts in Italy, Sweden and the UK. She met and worked with international masters such as Romeo Castellucci, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Mixail Marmarinos, Rodrigo Garcia, Dead Center, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper (Nature Theater of Oklahoma), Julie Stanzak (Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch), Chiara Guidi, Tomi Janesic, Fabrice Murgia and Elli Papakonstantinou.
In 2015 she founded Naprawski, a trans-national platform of artists, based in Göteborg. Her creations have been performed in Sweden, Norway, Italy, Iran, Greece, Netherlands and France.
Since 2018, she also collaborates with the Göteborgs Stadsteatern and its artistic director Pontus Stenshäll, for national and international productions.
She is awarded by the Italian national grant DE.MO./MovinUp, by MiBACT Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali and GAi – Associazione Giovani Artisti Italiani and since 2017 she is supported by the Swedish National Art Council Konstnärsnamnden.
She is also a proud activist-embroiderer. ARTIST’S WEBSITE