The Warp Audio Visual Spatial Performances
The Warp Fallback: Eternal Returns Workshop III
December 3, Saturday 10 pm,
December 4, Sunday 4 pm—12 midnight
at the Kunstkapel Prinses Irenestraat 19
▷ Zalan Szakacs presents Eigengrau (A Contemporary Phantasmagoria) ◁
Eigengrau, meaning ‘dark light’, is an immersive cinematic experience, a ritual in total darkness that solely uses light, haze, sound, smell, and movement. A light cylinder, a reference to the magic circle, takes the audience through a narrative of various mental states. The installation is inspired by phantasmagorias, which were originally built upon mythological stories, political, sociological, and religious propaganda as reflections of the zeitgeist. Eigengrau frames the negative space, creating a perceptual illusion and a temporary escape in a contemporary setting.
Eigengrau is a project by Zalán Szakács in collaboration with Sébastien Robert (sound design), Marta Wörner (choreography), Renske van Vroonhoven/Attic Lab (smell design), Rein Reitsma (product design), Daan Jonkers/RAITO (production design), Martijn van Boven (mentor), and Riccardo de Vecchi (architecture/photography/videography).
FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS October 21—December 12, 2022
The Autumn program of Audio Visual Spatial performances
For the Autumn program The Warp provides the counter balance for the Spring Ahead: The Afterlife program presented earlier this year with Fall Back: Eternal Returns. Just as we are prompted to remember to set the clocks forward by the command to Spring Ahead in the Autumn we know we must always fall back and set the clocks accordingly. For the Warp however, Fall Back means an attempt to return to an apparent new normalcy after the demise of the plans to transform the Kunstkapel into the Conservatory of Amsterdam but also as a reflection of the attempt to readjust after the extended Covid period that began in Spring 2020. With Fall Back: Eternal Returns we explore the recurring aspects that have characterized the work made in the Kunstkapel over the last ten year period.
The concept of the Eternal Return has been with us since Greek Antiquity when the stoics postulated that history was doomed to repeat itself infinitely since the universe and its concomitant energy is recurring. Nietzsche later transforms this into a thought experiment which questions what we would do faced with the information that we could be doomed to repeat ourselves. Nietzsche later had Zarathustra proclaim:
All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back … For all joy wants—eternity.
The actual physical reality of the Kunstkapel which we have treated alternately as an instrument, a vessel, a container, a space station, a space of contemplation, a place of madness and at last a place of recovery, is the site of eternal returns and its circular immersive quality provides the perfect object correlative for this proposition. The Autumn program will consist of the regular Audio Visual Spatial spectrum programs that usually combine three performances in a single evening, several ongoing workshops which will produce individual evenings for stand alone performances as well as club nights that create a different context to present a dynamic environment for more impromptu or informal performances.
