I enter a site which seems to be equally dystopic as utopic:
Between the Tårnby city center and on top of the motorway leading cars to the airport or out of the city, is a stretch of grass, unused and unattended to. It looks like the kind of place that new sky risers would be built as to pay for a mistake made at an earlier time in the commune. A place that has been forgotten but now has found a temporary purpose in Økocity 2.0.
In one direction I see common housing in faded yellow and grey, to the other side Bella Sky, with its shiny exterior, where light is casted off when it hits. Airplanes take off and land in the horizon in the sunset. The grass under my feet is begging for nourishment. The contrast is enormous.
I was just standing there quite a while, taking in the area, listening to the motorway as well as the people talking. There is a kindness which has found its way to the stretch of grass that seems to be lacking in everything that surrounds it. It’s welcoming to lower my gaze from the surroundings and walk into the performance festival.
The Økocity, formally known as Tårnby Park Studio, has been built in the previous days before the performance festival has begun. The structures centering the events has been build out of Euro pallets and secured into the ground. Other spots have been covered and create interim camps and have carpets on the grass as well as pillows as to give space to rest.
Watery Readings in a state of crisis
The first encounter I had was with Madee Cole and Aleksandra Lewón, who were in residency and presented their very first thoughts on their chosen focus which was Water Readings. The two artists had been invited to be in residence at the festival.
The format was open as it was a possibility to join a reading club, which took place several times during the festival. We gathered on pillows and listened as the artistic duo read from Waterlog by Roger Deakin.
The writing was in the style of stream of consciousness, like water itself difficult to make into a form that could be fully grasped. It slipped and slided from being a narrative I could follow into poetic phrases that resonated more with a purely bodily sensation.
Cole and Lewón explained the context further after the reading had ended, telling us how the writer, Roger Deakin, a British nature writer, set out to swim thorough the British Isles. The book was and is a celebration to swimming, although it has drowned a bit in language and phrasing which seems to be outdated as to contemporary standards.
It would have been interesting to hear more elaborate thoughts from the artists as to what their specific interest in hydro feminism and water ecology are, as the topic is one which has some years on its back with writers and thinkers such as Astrida Neimanis, who has written Bodies of Water – posthuman feminist phenomenology. A movement deeper into history is necessary as to open the terms up in their own right – and do we really have time in the state of crisis that is at the core of posthuman feminist thinking to keep diving into books that we already know are outdated in terms of both thinking and language?
Spect-actors by The Post-Cultural Body
The night continued with an interactive sound installation called Crying by the Sea – البكاء على حافة البح – which was an open-source theater production, connecting continents via telecommunication.
The work has been made through a series of workshops, by the group The Post-Cultural Body which consist of Amine Kouraichi, Ahmed Ben Abid, Moayed El Ghazouani, Mohammed Rowe, Rania Rezgui, Jazbo Gross, Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed and Eliza Bozek.
Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed was present at Økocity 2.0 to activate the work. We were all instructed as to open a link via our phones as to hear what Sander Haj-Mohamed was reading to us as well as to hear if others from The Post-Cultural Body was potentially going to engage with. It was also an invitation as to contribute to an online script, adding yourself to the work.
Sander Haj-Mohamed placed herself in an interim wooden structure, shielding her slightly from the wind yet leaving her open in view as for us to see her.
As the work began, she started by explaining where she was sitting, the location, what she was seeing and hearing. She was telling anyone who was listening, here and an open ended there, the setting in which she was performing. It made the scenery alive to me as well – to pay attention and taking nothing for granted.
Her voice echoed out among us, and it felt like a telephone call were no one was at the other end of the line, there was a loneliness which came through when she talked into a void, perhaps hoping for someone to reach out and respond.
She read out, as a mantra:
“I want to exist in a body, that can exist without me.”
An ambient soundscape slowly mixed itself with the words, as well as the words looped and met the audience with a delay.
As she continued on there was a mixture of poetic phrasings and sentences which intertwined with setting the framework for the thinking behind the work, such as mentioning Theater of the oppressed by Augusto Boal – a book in which Boal terms the phrase Spect-actor – referring to the dual role of those involved in the process of making or watching theatre as both spectator and actor, as they both observe and create dramatic meaning and action in any performance.
She asked out into space: “Who else is here right now?”
No one responded. It felt like there was an extremely interesting groundwork that had been done in the group, a sort of map of a performance had been drawn as a way for us all to cross some borders, but in the execution of the work they vanished a bit, leaving us with too few instructions as how to become engaged.
I wish the surrounding structures would have offered more support to Sander Haj-Mohamed and the rest of the group when performing Crying by the Sea. Her words often blew away in the wind, leaving me guessing what was being said, instead of letting me immerse into the gentleness of her voice and the heartfelt looping of grief and absent communities across physical borders.
When I returned home, I have spent time reading the scripts than anyone can write and submit at www.theatrebuilding.com which I can strongly recommend to anyone!
A Garden for Now by Punctures
The night for me concluded with A garden for Now, by the trio Punctures, which consists of Micaela Kühn, Maxwell McCarthy, and Alfredo Zinola.
Punctures works with an aim to create biodiversity and started their work and investigation
by planting a rich mix of non-crop plants on a disused field in the agricultural flatlands of Cavallermaggiore, Italy.
In Taarnby they were placed in the far end of the stretch of grass. They offered us all to take part in the investigating and shaping a temporary garden. They started by introducing what they saw was present which wasn’t significant by ‘normal’ standards, but there was something hopeful in pointing out what still existed in this harsh terrain, with a motorway as the nearest neighbor.
With few and precise instructions, we all participated in creating impermanent pathways within the two formations of gardens. We were divided into two groups, each group receiving two equally long ropes, that we could use to make the sides of a pathway to walk through the garden.
How did we want our path to be? Long and straight, or bending and twisting? Which plants and temporary waterholes would we like to walk by? How would we secure them from the pathway as to not let them be destroyed.
After the pathway had been laid, we walked them, without lifting our feet, just robbing them along the grass as to make the pathway appear in nature itself. Just as animals would do it, by walking the same paths every day.
It felt as if we were offered a possibility to meditate with the temporary garden, leaving traces which would last the duration of the festival and then change once again into something unattended to.
The work offered me a contemplation as to what gets seen and what get to be valued. It was a soft opening into re-imagining how we treat the land and how we care.
I have a soft spot for this festival which shapeshifts every year in Taarnby – there is always an interesting curation, and I deeply appreciate when someone offers live-art outside of the conventional formats. Within the three encounters this year, the range of thinking was wide and inclusive, gentle and heartfelt.
I did miss the physical placement of the previous years, where it was possible for more quiet works to be held by buildings and libraries. It would have been interesting to see the ecological thinking unfold on the lawns of Taarnby Park, even though the landscape around the Økocity provides a framework that is hard to disregard. It will be exciting to see what the festival will come up with next year!