Event
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The 18° Below the Horizon is a Performance Series of guided sensory explorations during astronomical twilight. Each performance creates a hybrid performative site and ritual practice to facilitate audiences' encounters with the multifaceted realities of an algorithmic audiovisual world. It transforms the on-site into altering ephemeral dwellings.
The series fosters the potential of intermedia articulation in storytelling, offering a fresh path for navigating a complex, technologically emergent world that conveys deeper ties between the past and current, between different cultures, and between distinct cosmo-techniques. It immerses the audience in an elaborate interplay between recollections of bodies and a stream of consciousness that is enfolding and evolving into contemporary poetic landscapes.
The first in the series, Salty Tears of Loss and the Sea premiered at the Light Festival Wasserschloss Reelkirchen in September 2024.
Encouraged by the narrative of missing migrants, the performance brought to life the human stories behind the headlines. The outdoor performance invites audiences to witness and participate in a communal act of remembering. When the sun dips 18° below the horizon, the Duo Ke3Yi3 guides the audience through the threshold between day and night, life and death. Participants gather in a stone circle, engaging in Tai Ji exercises to ground themselves before joining a shared ritual that weaved of songs, dance, and communal mourning to explore grief, migration, and data-driven collective memory. Salty Tears offered a sonorous contemplation on the grief of loss at sea through haunting vocals, extended movement, and encounters with true-to-life replicas of lost souls turning into transformative dragons. Ultimately, the performance culminates in the light of a fire and persuades an evocative collective healing experience.
The newly formed artist collab Ke3Yi3, meaning "can" in English, brings together visionary artists Echo Ho and Jiawen Wang, born in China, now based in Berlin, whose distinct life journeys shape their collaborative artistic endeavour. Ke3Yi3 is an altered form of the phonetic Pinyin translation of the Chinese word "可以", which signifies an affirmative openness to change and possibility and is inspired primarily by the I Ching, or Book of Changes. The ancient oracle and philosophy delve into the concepts of Yin and Yang, the nature of the Tao, and the importance of personal transformation and a worldview embedding deep ecology. Ke3Yi3 emphasises researching and crafting contemporary tools to create a hybrid performative site for ritual practice and artistic integration of prophecy and transmedia strategies to facilitate audiences' encounters with multifaceted realities in a complex, technologically emergent world. At the intersection of Taoism, magick, shamanism and algorithmic realms, Ke3Yi3 play with the generative potential from which all things arise and to which they eventually return. To perform and cultivate compassion, healing, and revelation and dig into humans' critical role in shaping the tendency of change in an ever-changing world to encourage a shift beyond anthropocentric worldviews, fostering a more cooperative relationship with the dynamic, interconnected web of life.