Installation and Performance

An exhibition and a voice performance realised at Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Cellar Hall in Tallinn, 29.11.-30.11.2022.

The gut is a channel for things to enter and for things to come out. For things to stay? A nest? For things to breed? Sprouts, germs, barbs, claws, boldness and fear. What comes in never comes out again? Ingested surroundings. Rumbling. To experience a gagging sensation. Organs shrivel up the body. To have the guts to drop, spit, and vomit. Sight-clouding dizziness. Sprawling.

→ Swallowing a Barbed Wire 

artificial gut, potatoes, iron, used engine oil, water, PE foil, microphone, cables

dimensions variable

The title Swallowing a Barbed Wire refers to the visual similarity between the potatoes’ sprouts and barbed wire. It‘s a research into the digestive system and the different ways in which it can be parasitized. The potato is a metaphor for things that are swallowed unconsciously or involuntary - ingested external triggers in the everyday environment that disrupt the smooth flow of digestion. The 23-meter-long gut built from artificial membranes and traversed by used engine oil and iron casted potatoes is an attempt to both grasp at and surrender to this uncanny gut feeling.

→ Voice of the Subconscious

→ Voice of the Subconscious

stream of the subconscious, moving tongue, saliva

Concept and choreography: Mara Kirchberg

Performance: Hanna Launikovich

This vocal performance is inspired by Anna Zett’s book Artificial Gut Feeling in which she takes up the challenge of registering the traces that systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. In the second piece, I’ve Got the Power, Agathe Bauer, the author writes about a disembodied voice located in their head continuously accompanying them since childhood. They write that the voice was 'powerful in a sick way, not in the pleasant way, and it was vibrating all over me, from my guts to my brain and back again'. The voice of the subconscious speaks to the audience from the bowels.

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