Challenge #8
MUT /CORE
Problem Statement:
Circus artist Fanny Soriano seeks to explore the physical relationship between living humans and the non-humans. Through physical and sensory experiences, she will question the place of the body in our society and its role in our relationship with the environment.
Challenge description:
Let’s start with the body.
Species are constantly evolving, transforming, adapting and mutating. What about our mutation?
The industrial, technological and digital revolutions have brought rapid and profound changes in our societies. Our virtual social interactions are taking up more and more space, diminishing or even replacing our physical social interactions, and distancing us from our natural environment and other living beings.
Is this mind/body/earth imbalance partly responsible for our disconnection from our senses? To our environment? As if the brain needed the body to connect with the earth, with other living beings.
What if our body is more sensitive and “intelligent” than our brain?
The challenge will be to use our bodies to summon/awaken our sensitivity to living things by interacting with them. Using nature’s scraps, raw, unprocessed elements with little or no ecological impact, simple physical games will be created to awaken our sensory and sensitive intelligence.
Residency characteristics:
Hexagone Scène Nationale is a multidisciplinary theatre that has developed a research activity that led to fifty residencies combining art and science.
Thought as a live performance, the artistic form developed with circus artist Fanny Soriano will explore the links between human body and its environment (including living beings). The challenge will be to use our bodies to awake our sensitivity to living things by interacting with them. The performance will be technically light using the body as common in order to reach a wide audience and to be reappropriated by other artists.
The scientist can come from sociology, anthropology, neurosciences, biology or other scientific disciplines and will try to bring resources to the artist’s questions. She/He will spend some time (April, June and/or September 2025 – TBC) with the artist and her circus team on the stage of the theatre or in other venues in Grenoble.
A podcast will be created for which the scientist will be requested. The artist and the scientist might also be invited to cross-disciplinary workshops including students from the Grenoble Alpes University.
Established artist bio:
Fanny Soriano
Fanny Soriano is a circus artist graduated from the Centre national des arts du cirque (France). First as a performer, then as a choreographer with the Compagnie Libertivore, she works on a form of artistic expression based on aerial disciplines, hand-to-hand, contact dance and improvised performances. She explores the relationship between nature and human nature through the body. Her acrobatic language probes the place of the human in a natural biotope. Inspired by nature’s breaths, from which she draws apparatus, set design and props, she seeks to highlight the virtues of a simplicity that is sometimes undetectable, unrecognized or underestimated.
LCC:
Naïma Ghermani
is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic, and political connections to other bodies of water. Astrida’s research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, makers, educational institutions, and communities, often in the form of experimental public pedagogies. Her writing can be found in numerous academic journals and edited collections, artistic exhibitions and catalogues, and online media. She is currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan on unceded syilx territory.
Joël Chevrier
is a physics professor at Université Grenoble Alpes and the current scientific director of the UGA Design Factory for Transitions, which aims to empower students to create innovative solutions and confidently navigate a world of change. From 2018 to 2023, he led the interdisciplinary Motion Lab at CRI Paris (Université Paris Cité), funded by the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller, focusing on a Science & Design alliance to explore “The Moving Body at the Heart of Learning,” leveraging digital technologies for future advancements in education, sports, and health. Previously, he was the principal investigator of the “Sciences, Design, and Society: The Factory of Contemporary Worlds” research program (2014-2018) and served as the scientific curator for the Arts & Sciences Soulages exhibition at EPFL (2016-2017). From 1998 to 2014, he led a research group at CNRS and ESRF Grenoble, contributing significantly to his fields of study.
Residency hosting institution
Hexagone Scène Nationale
Country
France
Keywords
Symbiosis, Metamorphosis, Body/brain interaction, Movement, Chaos
Related innovation areas
Sociology, Anthropology, Neurosciences, Biology, Light/night
Established artist
Fanny Soriano
Jury day
November 19, 2024