BONES

Systems are speculative. That is to say, systems are emergent phenomena, not artefacts of pure intentionality or design. They exceed their blueprints, overflowing the architectures of control humans try to impose on them. Systems are relational, processual, recursive, fungal, and promiscuous, taking shape through encounters, constraints, and the entanglement of forces beyond human "will". (Bayo Akomolafe)

COME IN TENT invites you to Bones, an immersive performance that interweaves analog, spiritual and digital media.

Bones is the third part of the research series: Dancing Instruments - In conversation with Looted oBJeCts

While a Namibian-German team of artists conducted intensive research on a Namibian looted art drum in the first two work sections, the third part, Bones , is entirely dedicated to the artistic transfer of knowledge: for example, that pre-colonial societies did not explicitly distinguish between the ontologies of humans, animals, plants, things, totems, ancestors and spirits. We encounter concepts in which the interdependencies between humans (human agency), the environment (material agency) and invisible agents (spiritual agency) form the basis of coexistence.

Claude Jansen, Fabrice Mazliah, Tuli Mekondjo and I-Fang Lin devote their attention to these practices, including in particular the 'spiritual media' (the "forces beyond human will") that create the complex connections between human and non-human, visible and invisible actors. Teaming up with Norbert Pape (augmented reality) and Johannes Helberger (digital sound modulation), the performers create a myriad of liminal spaces at the intersection of Africa and Europe, science and speculation, performance and ritual, human and matter, analog practices and digital spaces of possibility.