Bl0Wn

Performance

Concept, direction, choreography Joseph Baan
Performance Joseph Baan, Luc Häfliger
Sound design & composition Luc Häfliger
Dramaturgical support Joshua Wicke
Photos by Karin Salathé, Aala Nyman, Marc Jauss
Video Jumana Issa for Perrrformat

Shown at:
Swiss Performance Art Awards, Kunsthalle Baselland, Basel, 2023 (winner audience award)
Drifts Festival, Helsinki, 2023
Perrrformat, Zürich, 2023
Swiss Dance Days, Bern, 2026
Time Crystals, Amsterdam, 2027

Bl0Wn investigates the liberatory potential of performance by wielding a politics and practice of illegibility and incoherence. Social and state grammars generally aim to categorise, organise, and quantify individuals in ways that makes them appear on its grid, at which point individuals are forced or coerced to operate by its logics . To appear as illegible, unrecognisable, or incoherent signals a refusal of and potential escape from these grammars and their logics. Departing from the prism of “training one’s own incoherence”  as a methodology, Bl0Wn considers how becoming unrecognisable might offer the possibility of liberation from identitarian markers. By harnessing unrecognizability, illegibility, and incoherence as strategies to question and potentially abolish the constraints one is borne into, the piece aims to interrogate and negotiate the limits of our given realities.

Read about the work in an experience report written by Nils Amadeus Lange
Read about the work in an interview for Akut Magazine by Joshua Amissah (German)