SONGS TO THE SUNS
Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, CH) REVISITS on Monte Verità (Ascona, CH)
Exhibition Izidora l LETHE and installation Paul Maheke
2021
| staged documentation of performance |
| wall installation (shiny stone grey), graphite on semi-transparent paper |
| wall installation (shiny stone grey), graphite on semi-transparent paper |
Monte Verità – like the Cabaret Voltaire – has long been considered one of the most important places of the avant-garde, whether in relation to art, theory or lifestyle. It is therefore not surprising that artists around the Zurich Dada circle spent their summers on the hill in Ascona, which was regarded as the center of the Lebensreform movement. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, and Hugo Ball attended Rudolf von Laban’s courses, danced, held exhibitions and gave parties. Both in the Cabaret Voltaire and on Monte Verità, liberation from physical and linguistic conventions was central. The Lebensreform strove to free society from the stiff corset of bourgeois constraints through vegetarianism, expressive dance, naturopathy, light- and air-bathing, free-body culture and reform clothing. The primary focus of their «third way» between capitalism and communism was the individual, the body, and a way of life that was as «close to nature» as possible. Later, the Lebensreform’s criticism of progress and their interest in a mythical past found their way into fascist ideas. Numerous life-reformist ideas live on in today’s industries based around self-optimization and health. But they also appear where thinking is aimed at further challenging social categories through the body and its movements – and certainly in the search for alternative and communally organized models of life. However, the parameters around citizenship, identity, and knowledge have changed and need to be looked at from a new perspective. This return is not a nostalgic act, but rather a starting point from which to encounter concerns and forms of expression from the perspective of the present. «Songs to the Suns» combines holistic and fragmented approaches, and seeks a polyphony that challenges binary ways of thinking in terms of nature and culture, gender and origin. The focus is on the body as an archive and a site of emancipation.
With Izidora l LETHE and Paul Maheke, Cabaret Voltaire invites two contemporary artists for a collaboration with the Monte Verità Cultural Centre. Performers on the opening weekend will be Val Minnig, Stéph, Nina Emge, Inez J Barrer, Hermes Schneider, Donya Speaks, and Claudia Barth. Yantan Ministry will make an audio contribution. Christa Baumberger, Sophie Doutreligne, and Minna Salami will participate in the conversation.
About the Work
In the research-based works, Izidora l LETHE starts from the body as a site of knowledge- production and knowledge-repository. LETHE is concerned with revising depoliticized notions of landscape, geology, or the body in inter-dependence with its human and non-human environment. For «Songs to the Suns», LETHE pushes this groundwork further: with a focus on destabilizing the avant-gardists’ normative notions of body, movement and idea of freedom. In doing so, LETHE honors an embodied knowledge, that has often been systematically overlooked, noteably, the knowledge of the queer, female, non-binary/trans*, postcolonial and post-migrant body.
dualism of nature and culture, nor are bodies reduced to characteristics.
Instead of standardized systems of order, LETHE works formally and metaphorically with brackets and strata. The latter denote the horizontal geological formations, so-called «cultural strata», which preserve or release moments of history and the present. Furthermore, the body can be thought of as a stratum, as can the exhibition display – here, however, set by the artist as a «quere» (queer) wall through the historical building, illuminated with artificial light, in a construction that underlining an understanding of light as pure and truthful.
«You cannot look into the sun. There are incalculable universes, vast solar systems, gravitational pulls. 85% of all matter in the universe is invisible», writes LETHE in the risograph-poster designed by A Frei, that accompanies the exhibition. In the exhibition space, only the back of the display, which blocks the view, is sunny. The front shimmers gray, magnetic.
Brackets harmonize, embrace, create a logic, but they can also cheekily elude that same logic. In WE ( , LETHE performatively repositions the brackets. The open parenthesis is also found in the sculptures, which are reminiscent of corporeal folds and orifices, or botanical objects. As a form and a continuing concept, the brackets also show up as vignettes during the choreography/intervention on the opening day. They are performed by dancers in the broadest sense – people who practice an openness and access to their body knowledge. The individual vignettes are in turn informed by the nine «scores» in the «Casa dei Russi». LETHE understands the poses of the performers as vignettes that reflect a moment, a place, an idea, opening and closing brackets. *
Text written by by Salome Hohl
| Aio Frei (design/print) |
| Aio Frei (design/print) |
| leaning wall, large scale drawing |
| leaning wall, large scale drawing |
Izidora l LETHE
Sound
YANTAN Minsitry
Post-Production (spoken sound)
Aio Frei
Camera
Diana Pfammatter, Antoine Felix Bürcher
Val Minnig
Stéph, Nina Emge
Inez J. Barrer
Hermes Schneider
Donya Speaks
Claudia Barth