An investigation into the repertoire of performative gestures emerging from the work of German artist Ulla von Brandenburg and the practice of her troupe of performers.
"Five pairs of hands made their way through the printed vignettes—stills from Ulla von Brandenburg's movies and performances. They were her own, those of three of her artistic companions, the performers Benoît Résillot, Duncan Evennou and Giuseppe Molino—and mine. Their gestures—showing, grabbing, regrouping the vignettes—made it possible to uncover a shared expertise. I listened to the anecdotes, the rules, and the tales of a collective creation process. I linked together gestures, objects and ways of doing things. I shifted position: spectator, researcher– a guest into the hidden layers of gesture.
In this troupe, gestural transmission has always happened through practice: a memory held by the body, gesture itself being the guardian of its continuity. No score. Only the collective, the performance, and intuition. This Handbook to performative gestures gathers and unfolds these vocabularies and codes. It is the fruit of observations and conversations, of an inquiry led by these moving hands—put into perspective by the contributions of philosophers Barbara Formis and Jacinto Teias Lageira".
Camille Florance
Camille Florance, a researcher in contemporary aesthetics, is in charge of curatorial research, production, and publishing at the Ulla Von Brandenburg studio.
The work of Ulla von Brandenburg (born 1974 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Paris) is characterised by the diversity in the media she uses, which in turn translates into a thematic concentration. Certain motifs appear in different contexts, performances reger back to ideas in wall paintings, drawings prove themselves to be preliminary studies for films, and the props in films become objects in their own right. Her idea of carnival as a legitimate transgression of social order meets with the notion of mask as a desire for new identity and the confusion of reality and appearance in theatrical stagings.
Her work can be found in many prestigious French and international collections, including the Musée national d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris), la Tate Modern (London), the Kunsthalle of Hamburg and the Mamco – Musée national d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva. Recently, several personal exhibitions have been consecrated to her: “Manchmal Ja, manchmal Nein,” Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2016), “24 Filme, kein Schnitt,” Mamco, Geneva (2014), “Innen ist nicht Aussen,” Secession, Vienna (2013) and “Die Straße,” Art : Concept, Paris (2013). In 2015-2016, her performance Sink Down Mountain, Rise Up Valley scheduled in Performa 15 (New York), in The Common Guild (Glasgow) and the Kaaitheater (Brussels) was acclaimed by critics.
