a liquid platform on the climate crisis,
anthropocenic interactions and ecological transition
a project by MUSE Science Museum Trento conceived
and curated by Stefano Cagol
➭
Performance: October 25, 2022 H 15
@ Lake Ledro
Pile-dwelling Museum ➭ Conference:
26 October
H 18:30
@MUSE, Big Void Hall
Nezaket Ekici was
in Trentino for a new performance. The Turkish-German artist
defined by the press as the "worthy heir of Marina Abramović"
whose pupil she was, and known for her over 250 actions to her
credit, has been invited by the MUSE Science Museum in Trento
as part of "We Are the Flood", the project conceived and
curated by Stefano Cagol, that uses the languages of the arts
to reflect on the complex issues of the Anthropocene. On Wednesday 26
October at 6.30 p.m. in the spectacular central hall, the
artist Nezaket Ekici spoke with Stefano Cagol and the
audience, narrating the performance through images and
introducing her working method.
Nezaket Ekici's
performance at the Lake Ledro Pile-Dwelling
Museum has been conceived ad hoc. During an intense hour of the
Alpine afternoon, the artist interacted silently with a long,
heavy tree trunk that recalled the ancient Bronze Age pile
dwellings discovered in the lake. The contemporary trunk was
covered with layers of thick coloured felt, symbolising the
distance assumed by the human being from nature, but the artist
slowly freed it to create intense sculptural visions, finally
releasing it into the water, swimming with it for a stretch in
the cold lake in a symbolic reunion with the environment.
«It is a reflection, Cagol
explains,
about how we act in nature. There is an attitude common to man
today as there was 4,000 years ago, on the one hand, creative
and ingenious and on the other overbearing, which at Lake
Ledro we can read in the original presence of well over 10,000
pile-dwellings driven into the lake bed as emblematic of our
impact on the planet since then, primordial signs of the
Anthropocene».
MUSE's "We Are the Flood" returns to
dialogue with history after the summer exhibition in the
archaeological space of the underground Tridentum. At Lake
Ledro, Nezaket Ekici has established a close dialogue with the
place and the distant past to trigger a reflection on our
present and our future. Through a conceptual performative
attitude, Ekici wants to make people understand what is at stake
for humanity. It works to find new ways of living from the
intercultural experiences that are part of its DNA and from
different traditions, cultures and behaviours. In this case, the
comparison is with prehistoric humanity and its attitudes, with
these Bronze Age
peoples who inhabited the Alps for a long time, creating
pile-dwelling settlements. The focus is also on the water, which
Ekici has brought into his performance works more than 25 times
already and is undoubtedly one of the pivotal elements of his
research, with a dual character: generative and destructive. Let
us recall "Fountain" in which she celebrates water as life by
becoming a sort of Mother Nature dispensing precious water from
filled bags, or "Water to water" in which she rises monumentally
in an iconic red dress above a lake to stage a symbolic process
of water purification. Last spring, MUSE for "We are the Flood"
at Palazzo delle Albere showed a video of Ekici's performance in
Israel in the Dead Sea, where she floated motionless with her
face dangerously submerged in water. On the same occasion, a
photographic image also evoked the four-handed performance by
Ekici and Shahar Marcus in the Negev Desert, making sand flow
like an hourglass. Alongside Marcus, she had also been buried
under a tonne of stones in Berlin.
Bio
Born in 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey, Nezaket Ekici lives in Berlin
and Stuttgart and, in her 20-years-long career, has realised
over 250 live performances in 170 cities and 60 countries, and
participated in some 15 biennials - including Venice (2007),
Curitiba (2009) and Bangkok (2020). He recently made headlines
for his participation with an 80-hour performance at the Sakıp
Sabancı Museum in Istanbul in the major exhibition 'FLUX' on
Marina Abramović's research.
