Welcome to A movement to hold, a two-day programme that results from a collaboration between Köttinspektionen Dans and Konst. A series of performances and workshops that will tackle questions of collective creation and criticality.

Let’s think of a storage room as a place where we keep different objects, where we also leave memories and knowledge, a place where unexpected things can appear. How could we make that stuff available to many? Could we apply workers’ principles of self-organization, solidarity and resistance to cultural creation? A movement to hold is an open archive of artistic representations, which focuses on revisiting immaterial, critical and non hegemonic experiences. Through a series of performances, interventions and presentations we will share different creative processes with the aim of rethinking collective creation and criticality. A movement to hold is thus an archive for art in movement and for social movements, a storage room to which it is possible to go in search of ideas and knowledge.

 

15th of November

Embroidery in solidarity with Palestine

Rebellbrodöserna

18:00 – 20:00

Köttinspektionen and Rebellbrodöserna invite you to a workshop where we want to embroider our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Embroidery allows space both for processing our emotions and expressing different messages. Gathering around embroidery, together we create a safe space for collectivity and reflection.

Materials are provided (needles, threads, fabric and frame), but if you want to use a particular fabric or thread, please bring your own (for example if you want to embroider onto a textile bag or a t-shirt). The aim of the workshop is not to learn advanced embroidery, but we will teach the basics for people who have not worked with embroidery before.

The workshop is free of charge. To secure a spot, please register at kaayolia@gmail.com (please inform us if you have previous experience of embroidery or not)

Sandwiches, fruit, tea and coffee will be served.

 

16th nov

The Garden Grieves My Heart

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian & Åse Richard

14:00 – 15:00

For many years, residents of Gränby and Kvarngärdet in Uppsala have fought against sharp rent increases and renovictions*. This is also the case in the work “The Garden Grieves my Heart”, where flowers, juniper bushes and other vegetation in the city break the silence to depict tenants’ urban living conditions.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian presents a performative revision of his work and discusses its creative and social background with researcher Åse Richard.

*To significantly raise rents, by renovating rental properties, resulting in forced relocation.

 

Under the firelight, the ashes shine like glitter

Antoni Hervas

15:30 – 16:30

Every night, just before dawn, a humming voice would creep up from the street and enter the room whispering a beautiful song that woke me up. I liked to lie in bed, listening to that voice that lurked in the doorway flickering the flame of a lighter on a piece of foil. The dimmer it got, the more I wished it would never fade.

Antoni Hervas delves into Barcelona’s underground and follows the trail of a group of shooting stars during the 70s and 80s. A time when the pressure of the current political system forced them to withdraw from the stages where they forged their legend while demanding sexual equality. Instead, they took up a continuous (silent) struggle for survival and resistance to disappearance. This passionate story avoids nostalgia, claiming the construction of memory from the current practice of its protagonists. By recomposing vestiges of past actions, an archive of multidisciplinary resistance emerges and just like the people it refers to, it must face a constant struggle for survival. This is an eternal story of love and desire, of strength, life, laughter, wounds, scars, ashes and fire. The construction of a myth that is both local and universal.

 

Residency sharing 

Elena Novakovits and Nefeli Gioti

17:00-18:00

Elena and Nefeli will share in a playful presentation fragments from their residency period in Köttinspektionen Dans. Starting from the question ‘what dance can and cannot do’, they navigate through different angles towards more explicit forms and modes that this broad question can take. Spending time together to come up with common challenges, they focused on the role, the meaning, and the urgency of side jobs within the precarious dance and the broader performing arts field. A gathering of embodied narratives, anecdotes and photographic imprints of side jobs from or by professionals in the field across divergent geographical contexts, generations and positions will be on display.

Nefeli Gioti and Elena Novakovits will research and explore what dance can do and what it cannot do. They will explore potentialities of togetherness in collaborative processes, and how, even if we love dance, can we critically think about its importance in the Western context? They have an urgency to understand further the promises and dreams circulating in the discourses of dance and choreography, how they are generated, what are they carrying with them and what they render invisible.

Köttinspektionen dans is an artist run platform for dance and choreography, and we end this spring season with a sharing of works (in the making) by the artists running the programme here and also inviting Elinor Tollertz Bratteby to share the space with us with her solo process.

 

Tender motor

Kajsa Wadhia, Tove Salmgren och Moa Franzén

Duration: 30 min

Tender motor is a choreographic work where we use repetition and mutation to approach, entangle and disturb binary expressions. Entering into and playing with practices and references from acousmatic voice, metal-choreographies, the machine/motor, creaturely voice and expressions associated with femininity, we seek to inhabit voices and bodies that can challenge the idea of “human” expression and allow for moving and sounding through another/more-than-human landscape. In Tender motor the dance takes place mainly in our hairs, hand wigs and voices. The format of the performance resembles an unusual choir, or a band, where the three members give leeway for spontaneity and personal interpretation within a collective untrained vocal body. With a variety of approaches and entering points, often in direct relation to the ridiculous, we explore how we can come into contact with, and liberate different vocal bodies in the intersection between voice, breathing and choreography.

Tender motor is the groups third choreographic exploration of the relation between voice, body and movement.  The trio has worked together since 2018, and made two performances – ”From a throat of flesh” (2018) and  ”When dancing was done with the lungs” (2022).

 

INTER

Karina Sarkissova

Duration: 20 min

INTER is an essay film about migrational history, culture and the store Intersport. I traveled along the Northern coast of Sweden, visiting Intersport stores and reflecting on the relationship between rules in sport and rules in Swedish culture.

By: Karina Sarkissova, Editing: Ana Barata Martins, Dramaturgy: Oda Brekke, Advice: Harun Morrison, Elien Ronse

Commissioned by Myths and Realities – A Lesbian Odyssé, 2020. A project with and for queer youth in the North of Sweden.

 

where light glitter for no eyes

Elinor Tollerz Bratteby

Duration: 30 min

In this residency sharing I will share materials from my ongoing work with the project Semiotic Hurricane. Semiotic Hurricane gathers a number of practices springing from my interest in exploring acceleration over time. The practices show the way to somewhere with shimmering lights, hardly visible to the eye but perhaps possible to sense. Semiotic Hurricane is inspired by Byung-Chul Han who thinks around ideas of losing oneself in an absolute other, to fall, to get lost, to then find oneself again. Through the absolute other, something that is not me.

The work with Semiotic Hurricane is supported by Arts Grants Committee, Movement research, Region Uppsala, ccap, Hallen in Farsta, Watch Me Bake, Knivsta CIK, pavleheidler and many more unvaluable supporters. Thank you!

 

Our artist in residence at Köttinspektionen Dans this spring, Naledi Majola, is spending a month at Köttinspektionen working on a new project. On Wednesday, June 19th, we open the doors to the artistic process, inviting you to take part of some of the research materials and performative explorations.

 

Hey girls! Hey gals! Hey ghels! Hey girlie-girls! Hey gworls! Hey girlies!

 

Naledi is working on a project continuing their ongoing research into Black gender play. Inspired by vernaculars from South Africa and beyond, they are exploring how gendered language, depending on how it is performed, can actually destabilise the rigidity of gender. When and how do performances of words like “girl” call people beyond the binary sense of the word? Inspired by the artist’s theatre background and their curiosity about translating their solo practice onto a group body, they are creating a chorus on this topic. The relationship between text and movement is an essential part of this process and is supported by the artist’s writing mentor, Andi Colombo.

 

Naledi Majola (they/he/she) is a South African artist-researcher, based in Berlin. After completing a BA in Theatre and Performance, specialising in Acting, at the University of Cape Town (2014-2017), they started working as an actor, appearing in various film, television, theatre, and commercial projects. At the same time, they began to develop a performance-making and research practice, embracing various mediums, including movement, voice, sound design, and writing. After primarily working in Cape Town, Naledi moved to Berlin, where they completed the MA Solo/Dance/Authorship at HZT Berlin in 2024. Their work seeks to blur the line between theory and practice and is inspired by performance studies, pop culture, and South African history and art.

Revolve is an annual festival for performance art. Since the start in 2016 the festival has moved between different locations in and around Uppsala. This year’s festival – Revolve porous bodies celebrates the ongoing exchange between our bodies, our identities and our surroundings.

What happens if we let ideas of solid entities, sharp categories and graspability slip out of our hands, out of our minds?  What are the leaky connections that take place here and now in the meeting between materials, ideas, surfaces and spatialities? What spillages, loose threads, and ghosts linger in the space after the meeting?

The performances of this year’s festival have in common a desire to disrupt and defy limitations of definitions in favour of a certain boundlessness. Artistic processes are often nomadic, evolving through inhabiting many different places, bringing an emotional landscape in contact with many others, each time changing. This process of mutual transformation continues in the encounter with the emotional archive of each audience member.

The festival programme, which runs over two days, is located at two venues – Uppsala Art Museum and Köttinspektionen.

Revolve porous bodies is organised and curated by Köttinspektionen dans and Uppsala Art Museum in collaboration with Region Uppsala and the Dance project year at Region Uppsala folkhögskola.

Curators: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Uppsala art museum, Kajsa Wadhia and Karina Sarkissova, Köttinspektionen Dans

 

 

 

Friday 24^th of May
Köttinspektionen

Opening of festival

Join us to celebrate the opening of the eighth edition of the performance festival Revolve. Doors open at 18.00 and at 18.30 there will be an opening speech with presentation of this year’s programme.

time: 18.00-19.00
place: Köttinspektionen

Nazar Rakhmanov – POKROV

A video installation and live performance, where a 2×2 metre cube becomes a mobile hideout moving between cities and nations. A performance work about identity, belonging and nomadism.

time: 19.00-20.00
place: Köttinspektionen

“I have constructed this primitive supreme hermitage
for my primitive unsupreme body
in an attempt to ask myself
what am I beyond the fashion of my body, the gaze of somebody?
to take a piece of this land under my clothes,
arrest it for intimacy on my own terms.”

In May 2020 during lock down, I am constructing Pokrov: a 2×2 metre cube, in which I can walk, wearing it as a garment and mobile shelter. I am wearing it on the streets and surrounding landscape of my native town (Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Russia). Revisiting the places that hold memories of my childhood, I am hidden from the surroundings and gazes to contemplate my current identity and belonging to this land, in intimate touch with its soil. The beginning of the war in Ukraine collapsed my ideas of coming back there to live, work and love. From then on I knew that my future was to become a nomadic European. Pokrov fled the country of origin; this chapter was filmed in Sakartvelo (Georgia) near the Russian border. What does it mean “to belong” now, here, if you are forcefully displaced by war and a carrier of culture and language of bygone colonizers and current occupants of the land? This piece wasn’t supposed to become what it had to become and it will hardly be finished. It is a form of contemplation over ever changing relationships with the body that holds my identity and with the ground on which I stand and to which I belong.

“so, now we are here,
touch the ground
privet, hello, gamarjoba, Ӟечбур and other greetings”

Omrados – DJ set

time: 20.00-23.00
place: Köttinspektionen

My interest in alternative electronic music began at a young age when my cousin introduced me to artists like The Future Sound Of London. After experimenting with music production for a while, I transitioned into DJing and organizing smaller parties, which later grew into larger events at both established venues and more obscure locations. At this occasion, I will bring forward some of the songs and genres (such as IDM) that have limited space in the environment where I usually play, but are important to me because they open a window to a somewhat secret world of new experiences.

 

Saturday 25 May 

Uppsala Art Museum

Little artists – The home within us

A performance by Uppsala Art Museum’s own art group with children and adults from Ukraine.

Time: 11.30-12.30
Location: Vasaborgens southern wall, near the art museum’s café.

Our performance is the art of moving through time and space, where shelter becomes a work of art and hope becomes our inspiration. We embody the stories of those who left their homes during the war. We start from a void that symbolizes uncertainty and with each movement the contours of a house emerge, drawn with simple lines, as if they grew from broken threads. We embody traditions, carrying them within us across borders and mixing them with the culture of another country and our own identities.

Against a blank background, we create images of memories and hopes. With each movement we reveal a part of ourselves and share our destiny with the audience. In this performance, the audience witnesses the journey that each of us makes in our souls as we try to build our home from the void.

And through creation, we invite everyone to reflect: what does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to create a shelter out of nothing? Our performance is an invitation to understanding, empathy and inspiration to discover together new horizons in a world where culture and human connections are the most precious.

Stina Ehn & Oda Brekke – Manual

Stina Ehn and Oda Brekke, both dancers and choreographers, explore the relationship between place and body together with the students of the Dance Project Year at Region Uppsala Folkhögskola. The audience is welcome to come and go and move around in the room.

Time: 12.00-13.30

Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor 1

MANUAL is a choreography by Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn, created for and with the students of Dansprojektåret at Region Uppsala folkhögskola. During two weeks the dancers have been involved in methods where the relationships between place, body, impressions and form are being explored. Through a practice that alternates between writing and dancing, the students have conceived movement phrases that carry the meeting with a specific place. In this project we ask how the spectator’s gaze can be choreographed in a way that renegotiates the hierarchy between body and space. Can formal dances become porous in contact with other materials?

Choreography: Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn, Dance: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande “Smooth” Ehiwe,  Costume: Elise Nohr

Wezile Harmans – Umdiyadiya – When we remember
What objects and memories do you bring to a place that will become your new home? In the installation you are invited to reflect on your memories, together with others through needle and thread, and to encounter memories and reflections from South Africa’s turbulent recent history. 

Time: 12.00-17.00

Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor III

Umdiyadiya – When we remember is an open invitation from South African artist Wezile Harmans to collectively reflect on how a home is created. What objects and memories do you bring to a place that will become your new home? In this spatial installation, you are invited to reflect on your memories and, together with others, use a needle and thread to join the pieces together. The work draws inspiration from collective memories and attempts to trace historical events in black households during South Africa’s turbulent recent history of black displacement and segregation.

The performance installation consists of a sparse cotton jersey and bandages that are sewn together into a simple square, replicating the informal settlements that surround major cities as they are close to job opportunities. The artist processes memories of time spent in both welcoming and unwelcoming places with family and friends. Here, kindness and softness meet in an inhospitable and harsh environment. The work testifies that love also exists in unexpected places, in environments that seem ‘broken’. These beautiful and painful memories deserve to be remembered. Due to strict EU visa regulations, the artist was forced to participate without being physically present on the day of the festival.

Salad Hilowle – Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon

A fabulating performance about the artist’s self, identity and historiography.

Time: 14.00-15.00

Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor III

Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon (2024) is a performance centered on search and struggle, premiering at Revolve with Salad Hilowle. In light of the dramatic life of artist Francis Bacon, Hilowle explores his personal archive. His fascination with Francis Bacon’s expressive paintings, loaded with layers of emotion and personal detail, acts as a projection surface.  Salad Hilowle uses speculative imagination and humour to make projections about the past and present. The work oscillates between the artist’s ongoing efforts to inscribe the Afro-Swedish diaspora and the presence of these narratives in opposition to the established, white and masculine historiography.

Jenny Sunesson – Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce
A sonic live performance that gives voice to a dehydrated spruce tree

Time: 15.30-16.00

Location: Uppsala Art Museum, The auditorium

Jenny Sunesson’s live performance Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce gives voice to a spruce tree, which, as a result of the severe drought during the summer of 2018, started to produce masses of pinecones as an attempt to pass on its genes. The work is part of a larger series of auto-ethnographical works exploring Western society and its relationship to the forest, often based on the artist’s locality in the small community of Örbyhus in the municipality of Tierp. The tree itself, with its distinctive voice, grows on the artist’s property. Jenny Sunessons is interested in the materiality of sound and its image-making possibilities in the space. In the four-channel installation Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce, field recordings of the spruce’s internal communication are combined with other scientific mappings of how spruce trees’ struggles against drought materializes.

Region Uppsala folkhögskola Dansprojektåret – Student Open Space

Four student projects presented inside and outside of the museum

Time: 16.00-17.00

Location: Uppsala art museum och the park outside, starting in the museum reception

The dance project year is a course for dance artists focussing on community based dance projects. For the festival the students have curated a presentation of their different artistic processes inside and outside of the art museum.

Participants: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande “Smooth” Ehiwe, Alimatou Njie

 

Köttinspektionen 

Naledi Majola – In flux

A performance expressing a desire to become uncapturable.

Time: 19.00-20.00

Location: Köttinspektionen

“Nobody knew who or what you were when you had a suit on.” – Saidiya Hartman

A performance of Black gender play, with suits and the performer’s body as its primary materials, In flux is an expression of a desire to become uncapturable. This desire has much to do with questions about gaze and how some ways of looking can be an attempt at restricting and classifying ever-evolving bodies. Much of the movement, sound, and imagery tries to touch various Black contexts, with South African references, especially those originating during the latter part of the 20th century, in the country and abroad in exile, having a significant influence.

We are happy, excited and proud to present our 2024 season of residencies.

In May and June we will get to host Naledi Majola. In October and November, we will be hosting Nefeli Gioti and Elena Novakovits.

Naledi Majola is researching the performance of language through choral text. They will work around how text can destabilize gendered language, to imagine and enact the boundlessness of Blackness and gender diverse identities. In Black vernaculars from South Africa to the US, words can embody and perform to apply to a wider range of people. These kinds of queer embodiments and performances of language can destabilize and broaden fixed gender categories.

Nefeli Gioti and Elena Novakovits will research and explore what dance can do and what it cannot do. They will explore potentialities of togetherness in collaborative processes, and how, even if we love dance, can we critically think about its importance in the Western context? They have an urgency to understand further the promises and dreams circulating in the discourses of dance and choreography, how they are generated, what are they carrying with them and what they render invisible.

During the residencies, Naledi will show their work In Flux during Revolve Festival 24-25th of May. They will also have a residency showing/sharing for a bipoc and LGBTIQ+ community. Nefeli Gioti and Elena Novakovits will have a workshop related to the theme of their work. They would like to enrich the process by adding multiple voices to their perspectives and creating space for critical thinking and doing.

We want to thank everyone applying to our open call for very inspiring, broad and ambitious proposals. We had 133 international applications and 40 national applications. It was difficult to choose only two, yet the process was very inspiring for us.

Köttinspektionen Dans is led by a wish to facilitate processes and relations that contribute to artistic development and spontaneity. There is a lack of platforms and support for artistic research and processes without a finished/fixated product as an outcome. We want Köttinspektionen, as a space, to allow artistic practices to meet, develop and get challenged and therefore mainly invite artists with a process based practice, and works that can develop on site.

ACCESSIBILITY AT KÖTTINSPEKTIONEN

Köttinspektionen offers hearing loop, contact us before your visit. The premises are largely accessible for wheelchair and permobile use, as they are located on the ground floor. Unfortunately the space is lacking accessible toilets. We are working on getting permission to build one.

Our public programme has free admission. Welcome!

Köttinspektionen Dans is a performance venue and place for experimental dance and choreography in Uppsala, led by choreographers Karina Sarkissova, Tove Salmgren and Kajsa Wadhia. Köttinspektionen is an artist-run cultural centre located near the centre of Uppsala, and co-directed with the art collective HAKA and the theatre group Uppsalas fria teater.

The whole program see kottinspektionen.org

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