Anna Chwialkowska is an anthropologist, dancer and dramaturgist based in Berlin. Her creative research deals with strategies and means with which humans make sense of the world (e. g. through science or language). In her work, she investigates these different ways of sense-making through applying clear spatial forms and structures within which sense is being distorted, thereby mirroring or questioning our human condition. Her choreographic works include a spatial dilemma (2023), Forschung aktuell (2022), and A Line Makes Sense (2022).

She has completed her dance education at the Dance Intensive program at Tanzfabrik (2021-2022) and performed in works by Danilo Andrés, David Bloom and Nitsan Margaliot. As freelancer, she has been working as dramaturgical advisor and producer for Sergiu Matis, Britt Hatzius and cobracobra collective amongst others. She is co-leading the alter-archive Touching/Moving Margins together with Sasha Portyannikova and Nitsan Margaliot. 2017-2020 she has been working as project coordinator in the Anthropocene Curriculum project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 

Anna completed a B.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Spanish at Freie Universität Berlin and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá and a M.A. in Cultural Studies at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Center for Contemporar Dance in Cologne focusing on knowledge production in dance at the intersection of language and the body.

Maria Elena Mela Seidenari is a dancer and social researcher, seamlessly merging feminist discourse with movement and somatic practices. Graduating in Politics in 2013, she initially worked as a legal counselor in refugee centers.

Her dance journey spans Italy, Germany, and India, focusing on Tanztheater and culminating in her joining the Dance Intensive program by Tanzfabrik in Berlin in 2021. Here, she crafted it's my pleasure, a piece on female sexuality, funded by the Italian Ministry for Culture.

Her career expands beyond performance, as she conducted sociological research on menstrual stigma in Italy and Ethiopia, following a pilot project on menstruation in India.

In Turin, she served as a curator and dancer in community dance projects, and in 2023, she assisted in choreography for the company Chaim Gebber - open scene. In the same year, it's my pleasure toured Italy, performing in Turin and Rome, and expanded its format to include a collective workshop exploring pleasure and internalized censorship. Presently, Mela serves as a project manager for Movement Artisans and works as an archivist at the Media Library for Dance and Theatre at ITI, Berlin.

Mela's work delves deep into the intricacies of the body, weaving together personal, public, and political aspects with social and anthropological theories, creating a unique and compelling artistic narrative.

Joost Koster works with video, audio, drawing and performance, and applies principles of collage in every project. Regardless of medium they take found or made material out of its original context and reintroduce it into a new one in order to generate new meanings that were previously latent, concealed or non-existent. Collage works as an axis for relating to a ready-montaged reality (the spectacle/media architecture) and can expose the building blocks of our subjective formation. They collect the residue of scraping the surface of their interfaced reality (phone recordings, doodly drawings, screenshots, phrases, YouTube videos or gifs) to playfully create poetic and reflective cross medial works. They live and work in Amsterdam.

More about Joost Koster here.

Among current near-future scenarios of how to deal with the ecological crisis, we might find propositions towards surrendering of the human race to its coming fatal destiny. Ideas that follow that approach suggest practices such as self-annihilation as in Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape (2022).

We would like to dig into those ideas taking inspiration from the Siluetas series (1973-1980) by artist Ana Mendieta. In this photographic series, Mendieta marks the outlines of her body against the earth, using materials she finds in the woods: rocks, branches, flowers, fire, sand and mud. In some of her earlier Siluetas, she uses blood to fill the bodily imprint. What we can see in the succession of the images in the series, is the continuous disappearing of her silhouette into the landscape until it becomes almost imperceptible.

What interests us here mostly is not a dramatic staging of death – what we would like to unpack with Mendieta’s Siluetas are the nuances of a “death by landscape”: a surrendering body that is politically impactful on one hand and renouncing heroic martyrdom on the other, in other words: an ahumanist body (MacCormack 2020).

During the residency, we would like to explore through movement research an approaches to such an ahumanist body through movement research: How to generate a sensation of bodily dissolution while moving? What happens to a body that annihilates into the landscape? How can we simultaneously “vanish from” while “act upon” the world? What are the necessary technological conditions that can promote such a process? Where are the edges of danger and pleasure to this state and are they always separable?

Rather than developing a fixed practice, we want to explore different principles to movement that can generate the sensation of disappearing, as for example:

- Becoming “plant”, being absorptive and productive at the same time (Wilk 2022)
- Becoming “object” through Butoh and/or Body Weather practices
- Becoming a bloody silhouette, as in Mendieta’s radical feminist works
- Practicing “erotic sociability” (Bologh 1990), a concept that Isabel Lewis inspired us to do:

through attraction to an other find a state of detachment or “unself-consciousness” (1990: 309)

A lot of everyday activist practices are already acting upon the traces and imprints that our bodies leave behind on this planet and on the lives of its beings. We’re becoming vegan, we fly less, we reduce our trash, we try to disappear. “Make kin not babies” (Haraway 2016) is one of the strongest and perhaps most contested claims that points in that direction. While our research stays in line with such important everyday practices, we want to investigate the impact of these damage reduction practices on a sensorial level.

For that reason, the means which we will be using to dissolve ourselves in movement will necessarily reach beyond our movement expertise and invite video artist Joost Koster as well as sound and light designer Marcelo S. Daza to further blur the lines as well as a Butoh or Body Weather practitioner.

What we can imagine to emerge from this set of joint principles is a workshop series as well as a production that is able to move between indoor and outdoor spaces.