images above from NO MORE IDOLS, a collective performance opera by La Pocha Nostra, VestAndPage, Francesca Carol Rolla (Collective Signatures), in collaboration with Midori, Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Myk Henry, Amy Mauvan, Jesse Quaid, Paul Regan, Juan Carlos Villalba, Rebecca Weeks, Ian Whitford, and Adam A. Zduńczyk.
Image above from Molt Art Direction & Proshetics - Hermes Pittakos, Performance - Federica Dauri & Lisa Stertz, Music composition - Kris Vango. »Molt« is a movement-based statement that intends to break the grounds of a seemingly and inevitably, dualistic understanding of things. The binary that always borders one and the other in our Western wilderness shall be challenged in the attempt to think of a united whole. The main medium of this performative collaboration is the costume/prosthetic designed and created by Pittakos, which binds the performers, Dauri and Stertz, together. Images by Linda Kaposta.
Images above “Mazulis (Child)” by Gundega Evelone, referring to the burden of motherhood and the requirement of providing safety of the future. Images by Linda Kaposta.
Images above from Nao Bustamante’s "Given Over to Want". Sculpting the body with tape, shadow-play and boxed wine all provide material for the exploration between human want, both natural and contrived. The performance deals with the themes of transformation and desire. The image is as primordial as it is hungry and holy, both fully human and fully alien. Images by Linda Kaposta.
Images above: Anda Lace’s performance Untitled, constructing a universal symbol to ward off the “Nazar”, an amulet to ward off the “evil eye”.
Images above: Ron Athey’s Acephalous Monster. After the Death of God (famously proclaimed by the philosopher Nietzsche who anticipated the end of religion in Western society), Athey considers it one of the artist's roles to invent new forms of ritual and celebration, to conjure the sacred as an antidote to the empty individualism of contemporary life. For his new work, Acephalous Monster, Athey turns to the Acéphale, the figure of the headless man, which inspired George Bataille's secret society of the same name to combat nihilism and fascism before the Second World War in France. The headless or beheaded man is a powerful symbol of radical transformation, the driving force of all of Athey's performances pushing towards the merging of humans and gods. Photography by Lauris Aizupietis.
Images above: Michael Fliri’s Polymorphic Archetypes. Michael Fliri’s work makes us question our ways of understanding the archetypes and investigates the training process of identity. In doing so the artist takes the symbolic cue of the mask. What happens when you mask a mask, when a mask is overlapped over another one and then another one again and these layers get mixed up and absorb into one another? Like in Plato’s cave metaphor it raises the question on what stays hidden, what is hidden behind what is visible?