AFLOAT - CURRENT - THE THREE SEAS
BUOYANCY A TRIOLOGY BY BERG
Title: AFLOAT
Keywords: video essay, screen dance, eco-politics, ecoperformance, ancestors, animism
AFLOAT is the second segment of the three channel/episode work BUOYANCY.The focus is existential sustainabillity, animism, body, space, movement with interest for agency and community forming. It interweaves walking practice, screen dance faith ceremonies and individual voices in contemporary society in Japan.
The work will explores the relation between animated nature in Sweden and Japan through, suriashi, pilgrimage walks and “grave friends”/Hakatomo - a phenomena where people develop new friends to be buried with.. Across Japan sociologist Harare Inoue stared 'The Ending Center' where social activities addresses issues of loneliness, expensive burials, lack of burial land etc. July presents us with opportunities to also experience season bound collective and public ceremonies. For other parts of AFLOAT we will depart from Skånbergs long relation with a studio in Kyoto and connection with dancers/choreographers she has developed for more than 20 years.
It unfolds the passage from this world to another (humans and more than humans) ie Kami and more so about the ancestor aspect . It interweaves stories of past, present, and future centered around situational and physical contexts and relations by visualizing possible futures of coexistence via the artwork drawing from screen dance and documentary installations.
The trilogy BUOYANCY can be seen as installation (3 channels) or as a film with 3 episodes. As installation they might be addressed in duration and by that be adaptions of three single channel work.
Time line Trilogy on site stays:
Segment 2 : Tokyo 1-5, Kyoto July 5-12, Kumano Kodo 12-20, Tateyama 20-24, Tokyo 24-27 (July 2024)
Segment 3 : Istanbul November 2024
Segment 1: Bandung Indonesia May 2023
CURRENT has been selected for a number of screen dance festivals among them Festival VideoDanza in Puerto Rico. It will premiere in Sweden at ScreenDance Festival in Stockholm and the same week at Supermarket Art Fair in April 2024. World premiere was in Khazakstan in January 2024.
BERG DUO (Hallberg & Skånberg) Works at the intersection of lens and embodied practices, towards reconfigurations of subjectivity by visualizing a possible futures. They work with the concepts of in-between, the state of becoming, they incorporates dialogues (embodied, spoken, text, visuals, audio) into a fabric towards entangling systems.
BERGS interest for the intersection of lens and embodied practices is something that takes place both in the artistic development but also as the work is made public.
In Japan (several locations) we will develop "AFLOAT” it taps into Ami Skånberg practice, she belongs to a traditional Japanese dance studio in Kyoto for more than 20years and developed her Phd in artistic research on the single step Suriashi, ie sliding foot. Skånberg is invited to do a lecture at a Tokyo University and has received funding to do so in a program linked to Gothenburg University. Hallberg has a background in documentary based video installations often on existential topics. In a series of works Hallberg and Skånberg draws from their individual practices and combines screen dance and documentary based video installations.
The duo with Swedish artists Ami Skånberg & Anna Viola Hallberg (BERG) started to collaborate in the fall of 2022 doing a series of works during a residency. They have made workshops, interventions, residencies, exhibitions and collective performances. In 2023 they held a workshop in Finland “Walking is also space”. In 2023 they instigated the program WAP/Walking As Practice to continue the artistic research on the relation between walking and art. This will be panned out in a text in the upcoming anthology from onebywalking.net. Berg duo is also, up on invitation, making a series of collective interventions over bridges. Ex Suriashi for Bonn. The series will continue to grow as a parallell project to the Trilogy and WAP.
CURRENT >>>
BIO BERG Research Catalogue >>>
Berg has a fellowship studio at BKN.