Sara Cowdell: it’s a CATASTROPHE
PLACE: Danasali, Vanha viinatehdas (The Old Liquor Factory), Manilla Culture Factory, Itäinen Rantakatu 64 B
DATE & TIME: Sat 6.9. at 19–22:45
DURATION: 3 h 45 min. The piece has no clear beginning or end, and the audience can move freely during the performance. The piece does not require pre-registration.
LANGUAGE: English
Information about accecibility here
When and what does it mean to fall apart? And how does one put oneself back together? Examining the cycles we move through in the process of so-called ‘healing’, this work does not seek resolution but instead lingers in the contradictions. The performance happens where the personal meets the systemic, where dissolution is both loss and possibility; in the tension between structure and chaos, between self-help neoliberal rhetoric and genuine transformation.
What if healing was not about becoming more functional, but a surrender to the wild, uncontainable forces within us? The artist works in the performance with a large amount of non-newtonian liquid, ooblek, manipulating and fighting with it as a metaphor of the soft and harsh sides of this struggle, confronting the grotesque beauty of catastrophe, the uncanny interplay of surrender and resistance.
Sara Cowdell (she/her) is a New Zealand performance artist and curator. She is the director and founder of Performance Art Week Aotearoa, as well as an independent curator. As a performance artist, Cowdell utilizes multiple modalities including action, costume, somatics, and ethnography to explore society through a formalized and qualitative intimacy. Cowdell’s work strives for a raw viscerality and lingers on the uncomfortable textures of lived experience. She screams the words you keep trying to swallow because they feel so unbearably uncomfortable in your mouth. Cowdell has worked extensively with site-specific practices and has created and presented work in numerous political, natural, and unusual sites, alongside traditional arts and theatre spaces. She has presented work across South Korea, Germany, Denmark, India, US, Australia and New Zealand.
www.saracowdell.com