Inflammations (pandemic edition) deals with chronic pain and the way it affects bodies and their relationship to time, work, and pleasure. The performance stems from the artist’s interest in autoimmune diseases and difficult-to-treat medical conditions such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. It problematizes the boundaries between well-being and sickness, medical authority and felt experience. While recognizing chronic pain as a form of disability, it speculates further on fatigue as being a possibly persistent condition of both the performer’s body and the capitalist subject.
In Inflammations (pandemic edition), it is the everyday violence of language and its ability to stab, stiffen, and infame that is being examined by the performers. Words trap vivid experience within sterile medical discourse, penetrate like a surgical instrument, or organize the body into a peculiar anatomical theater. The work looks to find relief from pain and suffering by exploring possible infrastructures of care. Environments in which—through ordinary play and rest—the game slows down, the mysterious becomes tamed and fatigue articulates its erotics.
2020, Audio recording of performance, (excerpt)
This piece was presented as a durational performance at Ecology of Attention #2: Ignition Cycle
Angela Alves identifies as a female/crip/disabled artist, one trying to find comfort in the art of unavailability and unpredictability. She studied dance at ArtEZ (NL) and Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Alves is based in Berlin and interested in artistic strategies of exhausted bodies. In 2014, she founded TURN. Neue Bewegung für Multiple Sklerose e.V., an association for artists with MS which also offers dance workshops.
Ania Nowak’s expanded choreographic practice approaches vulnerability and desire as ways towards reimagining what bodies and language can do. She develops formats such as live and video performance, performative exhibition and text. Nowak’s overall inquiry is into the political dimension of body material and its immaterial aspects -affects, feelings and intuition- to think of new, embodied practices of care and companionship. She is especially interested in the latter when taking into account the unstable, transnational character of our lives and work in the Western world today; experiences of sexuality, sickness and grief, as well as, ethics of pleasure in times of climate and political urgency. Nowak’s works have been presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele and Berlinische Galerie in Berlin; Nowy Teatr, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; Art Stations Foundation Poznań, BWA Wrocław, CAC Vilnius, Institut Kunst Basel, ICK Amsterdam and M HKA Antwerp a.o. In 2021 she is Artist-in-Residence at Ankara Queer Art in Turkey and Q21 MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. Nowak lives and works in Berlin.