A drift into the increasingly unknown, Protozone18: Unfamiliar Evermore occupies a space between recognition and estrangement, fantasy and absurdity — being both in the moment and outside of time. Our present is fracturing, and here, at Shedhalle, the Protozone Series is coming to an end. We want to sit with this moment, with both its precarity and fantasy, not knowing what will come next.
As the fifth and last Protozone curated by Michelangelo Miccolis, Unfamiliar Evermore is a loving farewell, a multi-format program including performance, film, installation and conversation. The program shifts from high to low intensity, unfolding as a living process of exhibition-making and collaborative exchange, while tending to the evolution of relationships and working processes.
The artistic processes in Protozone18 are rooted in performance and adopt film as one of its extensions. Through acts of speech, movement, and exchange, the participating artists engage in practices of resistance, refuge, and invention. They dismantle and reassemble language through utterance and gesture, allowing it to reflect the contexts we inhabit while opening up alternative possibilities. Language, or its lack, becomes a tool to resist entrenched norms, proposing new systems of meaning and interaction.
Ivan Cheng, Kris Lemsalu and Joanna Ulfsak focus on personal identity, autonomy, and representation, presenting works that amplify the performative construction of the self, to challenge traditional notions of authenticity and blur the boundaries between reality and performance.
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Army of Love (Ingo Niermann + Frédérique Vivet), and Eglė Budvytytė emphasize collective practices that reimagine community within artistic, social, as well as posthuman frameworks. Encounters play a central role in these works, not only between artists but with participants or the natural environment as well. These projects evolve through workshops, collective practices and symbiosis, inviting audiences or the environment to actively shape the collaborative processes at play.
This program reflects our ongoing commitment to collaboration and the exploration of new artistic frameworks even and especially when the future is unknown and the present feels unfamiliar.
