Performance Studies: On Extraction

By taking the exhibition Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman at Kunsthalle Wien as a framework or point of departure we jointly facilitated open study sessions (as part of Projekt-Modul II / MA Critical Studies) to learn about, share, rehearse and try out practices through which we study our own complicities, and in the best sense refuse, resist and oppose modes of extractivism, both in terms of our relationships to land and resources, as well as in terms of social, imaginative, and learning spaces, collaboration and art making. 

For this open study session we invited Valentina Desideri, Alix Eynaudi, and Anne Juren:

Performance Studies: On Extraction

Valentina Desideri, Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren

The invitation for this session is to gather in study around notions and practices of extraction. We will use dance and performance tools and methods (such as somatic and movement practices, scores for collective thinking and critical enquiry, the composition of scenes, props, or scripts, amongst other possible tools) to sense and make sense of extraction. The study session will last 3 hours, it will happen inside the exhibition space and therefore it will also be a public performance of sorts. We will play with the specific modes of plotting and unplotting attention that the performance setting provides and let it contribute to our study.

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), an MA in Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a BA in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London). She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org.

Alix Eynaudi dances, works and writes between craft & chaos in a (most of the time) joyful mess. She doesn’t work alone; any event, research, invitation is an alibi to spend time with accomplices, a mesh of friendships scintillating under skins, a stirring of a full-of-wonder support. She specializes in (deep) choreographic hanging out sessions.

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer, artist researcher and Feldenkrais Practitioner born in France. She lives and works in Vienna, where she founded the Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung association in 2003. Juren’s choreographic and artistic works are shown in theatres and museums, at festivals and at biennial exhibitions worldwide. In her artistic practices, Juren seeks to expand the concept of choreography by exploring the body's sensorial, kinaesthesia and soma poetics. Juren has been a Feldenkrais practitioner and soma therapist since 2013. In 2021, she finished her PhD at the Stockholm University of the Arts under the supervision of André Lepecki and Sandra Noeth.