Agenda

14.03 - 11.05.2025

ProtoZone18

curated by Michelangelo Miccolis
23.05 - 20.07.2025

ProtoZone19

curated by Phila Bergmann & Thea Reifler
01.08 - 28.09.2025

ProtoZone20 (FINALE)

curated by Lucie Tuma, Michelangelo Miccolis, Phila Bergmann & Thea Reifler

Simone
Augtherlony
& Jen
Rosenblit

Part of ProtoZone17: Stories of those left behind, 15.11.2024-12.01.2025

 

Edgelands

 

“Edgelands” speaks to the margins, the decentralized and out of focus without trying to recenter or refocus as a strategy for value making. To elaborate this, the work departs from the geographical phenomenology of Badlands which are characterized by steep slopes, minimal vegetation, lack of substantial regrowth and common where there are unconsolidated sediments, making them difficult to navigate. This ‘bad’ or eroded land is a place we cannot tame, regulate or refurbish. Badlands offers Edgelands a physical, poetic, ecological and phenomenological site to consider age and aging, refuse and abandonment as a plateau for speculation on the problem of progress.

 

This work hosts the politics of ruination that comes with the proximity between ruinophillia (lust for ruins) and ruinophobia (fear of ruins). By widening the binary of lust and fear we look toward the notion of rot and decay as inherent to architectures themselves rather than the efforts to renew or cover up traces of exposure to the elements. Rot speaks of this process as reeking of mortality, vulnerability, and the inevitability of death.

 

Through a complex apparatus of worn and weathered materials, ungovernable processes continue despite lack of use or usefulness. Construction scaffolding houses a poetic of architectural transitioning while body-scaled vitrines curate failed attempts to preserve where the process of rotting magnifies other things that grow in this space. Like a humid corner or condensation forming on shattered glass, this decay suggests multiple states of abandonment inclusive of and inviting a rewilding. The performers offer nuanced articulation of how an ecology of relations can flourish beyond utopian ideas of progress despite dystopian tendencies towards total destruction.

 

A place on the precipice of collapse and transition, the work eroticsizes architectures that embrace decay and aging amidst and passing through this dilapidated terrain. An unstable territory comes with the promise of collision, being in and getting in the way of progress by way of a communal slippage where things are in varying processes of coming down together.

 

Concept: Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony

Performers: Bast Hippocrate, Mélissa Guex, Ondrej Vidlar

Speculative architect: Li Tavor

Light design: Joseph Wegmann

Technical management: Jan Olieslagers

Production: Umar Hallawi

Sound composition: Simon Grab

 

Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Berlin and Zurich, working predominantly in dance, performance and visual art contexts. They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last eighteen years. Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that foster both familiar and unknown quantities. Simone’s works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as a world building practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements.

 

As a performer they have worked with artists such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and Forced Entertainment amongst others. In recent years the works «Biofiction», «Uni * Form» (co-authored with filmmaker Jorge León) and the collaborative project, «Everything Fits In The Room» with artist Jen Rosenblit, a commission from HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, have toured extensively. These works were presented at the 2018 Venice Biennale Teatro for an invited artist focus. «Remaining Strangers», an interactive work that interrogates the guest/host relation concludes their research into conceptions of the stranger of which «Compass», a collaborative work with Saša Božic and Petra Hrašcanec,and «Maintaining Stranger» are an integral part.

 

Simone has received the KFV funding – a cooperative funding body from the city and canton of Zürich, as well as Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council between the years 2006 to 2020. They were recipient of the city of Zürich recognition prize in 2011 and the prize recipient from the Federal Office of Culture in 2015. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as HZT – Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin, ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts, Manufacture in Lausanne, DAS Art Amsterdam amongst others as well devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.

 

Jen Rosenblit holds space in New York City and Berlin in hopes of a more expansive sense of home and place. Making performances surrounding architectures, bodies and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness, Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst impossible spaces. The research process tracks the tangential rather than the linear, looking for meaning as it emerges between things.

Rosenblit has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns and Philipp Gehmacher.Recent works include I’m Gonna Need Another One(2018-2019 co-production between Sophiensaele(DE) and The Chocolate Factory Theater(NYC)), Everything Fits In The Room( a 2017 collaboration with Simone Aughterlony, HAU Hebbel am Ufer), Swivel Spot (2017, The Kitchen), Clap Hands (2016, The Invisible Dog/New York Live Arts), a Natural dance (2014, The Kitchen). Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 Atelier Mondial Artist-in-Residence in Basel, Switzerland, a 2015-16 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2016 recipient of the MAP Fund, a 2014-2015 Workspace Artist through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2013 Fellow at Insel Hombroich (Nuese, Germany) and a recipient of the 2012 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

 

Production: Imbricated Real

Support: Fachstelle Kanton Zürich Gruppen Förderung & Stadt Zurich Kultur Fachkommission Tanz und Theater

 

Shedhalle – Jen Rosenblit & Simone Augtherlony

'Edgelands'
Courtesy of the Artists