Swelling muscles, nerve fibres, synapses and emotional registers. The eighth edition of Revolve performance art festival is a body mass in motion. These are baroque times, with unreasonable world leaders, wars and clashing worldviews. Our digital feed is saturated with the ungraspable physical suffering of the outside world, while hyper-realistic, simulated digital worlds seep into our pores.

Among this year’s performances there is an interplay between the surface of the skin and the underlying emotional register, between form and the sensuous. The body as fiction and reality is set against the political. What spaces for action and interpretation can be liberated in this encounter? The festival is weaving together themes from the group exhibition Corpus Cosmos at the museum, where cosmological and spiritual ideas meet medicine with various historical reflections. Welcome to a festival where the flesh explains the world.

The festival program, which runs over three days, is located at two venues – Uppsala Art Museum and Köttinspektionen. The festival is organized and curated by Köttinspektionen Dans and Uppsala Art Museum in collaboration with Region Uppsala

Curators: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Uppsala Art Museum, Kajsa Wadhia and Karina Sarkissova, Köttinspektionen Dans

PROGRAMME

Friday 23/5

Watch me bake – MASSA
Time: 18:00-18:30
Location: Forumtorget, ending at Köttinspektionen, Standbodgatan 3
Language: Instructions in English or Swedish.

Between surface and depth, between collective impulse and individual presence, a space opens up to see and feel the world anew. Join a collective/artistic/physical walk with Watch me bake that starts in the city and ends at Köttinspektionen. We meet at Forumtorget and move together towards Köttinspektionen, starting at 18.00. The walk is open to everybody who wants to make their way to the festival together. Please note that the route partly includes uneven terrain and crosses trafficked roads.

Concept: Erika Martikainen, Linéa Alfredsson och Ida Mandrén
Participants: Erika Martikainen, Linéa Alfredsson, Ida Mandrén, Csilla Domonkos, Elsa Lundkvist, Isak Mård and Paulina Lidholm

Jen Rosenblit  – conducting oceans
Time: 19.00-20.00
Location: Köttinspektionen, Strandbodgatan 3
Language: English

A detailed account of the absurdity of trying to organize ungovernable bodies. National security is driven by the effort to align, acquire and consolidate land mass as if being a nation or a community ever worked in everyone’s favor. The persistent nobility around self care as a capitalist manipulation to render control over our bodies as separate rather than part of nature as an unquantifiable and unpredictable container, a material transitioning in constant response to its surroundings. The choke hold of possibilities for love via friendship rather than the decaying architectures of intimacy bound to ownership, monogamy and fear of being left behind.

It has all become impossible to hold.
These tumultuous accumulations behave like scornful parents and render our bodies and their faulty yet durational architectures, childish.
While it feels severed, we have finally lost our secure hold.
While bumping against flimsy walls we are no longer belonging but continuously existing and overgrowing.
For some it didn’t get better as promised but in fact worse and for others there was never any such promise.
Rosenblit sketches an unfinished encounter owning up to the largeness of this body and the erotics of the erosion of a voice.
“conducting oceans” breaches a certain manipulation tucked into the folds of desire.
Marked by unreasonable situations asking, sometimes tricking, the viewer to take over, this solo further elaborates the artists` tendency toward articulating (im)possible multiplicity as desire`s primary domestic partner.

kräm – DJ set
Time: 20.00-
Location: Köttinspektionen, Strandbodgatan 3

kräm is a producer and DJ in constant exploration of a challenging electronic soundscape, with a firm footing in Stockholm’s underground DIY music scene. A member of the music collective lur and host of the show mëld, kräm performs with a fondness for glitchy, smeared tones and shifting rhythms—often with bas bleau—on Malmö-based Retreat Radio.

Saturday 24/5

Louis Schou-Hansen – Tragedy
Time: 14.00-17.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, floor 1
You may come and go as you wish in the performance installation.

Tragedy is an all-consuming space, where two miserable fictional characters enact a slow, endlessly looping nightmare. This dreamscape takes the shape of an entrapment, a labyrinth without walls, a site where Western cultural tropes from the baroque until now take shape as disordered compulsions: lap dances, star-crossed lovers, cowboy fantasies, dying swans, court des ballets, still lives, and Hollywood sex. Tragedy is a non-emotional burial ground for an undying history—a form of time in decay.

In 2019, artist and theorist Alina Popa wrote in one of her final essays, “The body is real, but what we think about it is fiction.” While alluding to the “real” as the material properties of the body, such as flesh, bones, blood, skin, etc. Popa also points to the body as a disciplined container where complex fictional realities are cultivated until they penetrate our skin and stick to our flesh as something true. Drawing on an expanded interpretation of Popa’s 2019 quote, Tragedy explores the body and its surroundings as a complex network of destructive Western fictions where all of us become violent agents of a dying world.

Performance, sound and costumes: Louis Schou-Hansen
Performers: Thjerza Balaj & Elise Nohr Nystad
Textile work: Karoline Bakken Lund
Photos: Chai Saedi
Outside eye: Alexandra Tveit
Trailer/Documentation: Chris Helberg
Funded by: Arts Council Norway and PAHN – Performing Arts Hub Norway
Co-production: Podium Oslo

Laia Estruch – Stray Birds / Ocells Perduts V67
Time: 15.00-15.30 and 17.00-17.30
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, The staircase and outdoors

How many sounds can one single body harbour? The Catalan artist Laia Estruch has developed her own performative practice where the voice and breathing become an extension of the body. Ocells Perduts V67 (2021) is a sound creation and experimentation project, between sculpture and performance, in which an investigation is carried out into the body of trees and the voice of birds in relation to the human body. A proposal for research and creation, based on the capacity of our voices to travel, interact and migrate.

The idea for Ocells perduts was first sparked in early (2020) when Estruch came across a Catalan translation of Stray Birds (1916), Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of aphoristic poems, at a second-hand bookshop in Mexico City’. The works explores performative use of the voice, including the punk Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and the Andalusian blind bird-listener Jose Carlos Sieres, or previous bird vocalizations as practiced by the American Joan La Barbara. In her unique solo act, Laia Estruch lets her voice soar.

Maja Fredin – Broiler
Time: 16.00-16.30
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Vasasalen / The auditorium

Lately I have been thinking a lot about chickens, meat and muscles.
Fabricated chickens whose muscle growth is maximized to the extent that the legs break under their weight.

As the Broiler became the perfect metaphor for the industrializing and optimizing the self, I am forcing myself to look at the world through the lens of a bodybuilder. An investigation of the ego-centred times we live in, an era where the world is on fire, everything seems to be fake and plastic, but as a paradox authenticity and personal growth is rewarded.

I am now totally absorbed in gym training and the building of my own flesh has become my art form. The perfectly moulded antique marble statues are lingering, just like the fascist movement once glanced back to this so called “white supremacy”. Once a colourful world, stands now cold and pale in its hollow perfection.

I dream of revolution and a paradigm shift.
But what do I do instead of raising hell?
I go to the gym. Because it is easier to improve upon yourself than the world. When I lift the self becomes irrelevant, I am simply my body and my breathing. The flesh.

Deva Schubert – Glitch Choir
Time: 19.00-19.50
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Vasasalen / The auditorium

Glitch Choir transfers the phenomenon of the glitch into the analog space. At the center of the piece is the recomposition of a song of lament through glitching. Historically, public mourning has primarily been performed by women, so-called lamenters, who, in exchange for payment, give emotional expression to others’ grief for the deceased. It is mostly women, who are allowed to, but also damned to glitch the private into the public.

The two female performers open up a collective body of mourning by creating a space of intimate multiresonance. In the vocal distortion already inherent in the lament, a transformation of mourning into a collective glitch takes place. What kind of choir emerges in the dissonance of frequencies?

In the Glitch Feminism Manifesto (2013), Legacy Russel looks at the glitch as a moment of (technical) failure that manifests an interruption of information. This disturbance produces an opening of representation. Not only does something break, but something else, something new, emerges. It is a search for polyphonic moments in which the hybridity of our lived reality resounds in mournful and rebellious songs.

Concept & Choreography: Deva Schubert
Performers: Chihiro Araki and Deva Schubert
Composition and Sound design: Ben Meerwein
Costume: Ama Tomberli
Production: Wiebke Wesselmann
Funded by: FONDS DARSTELLENDE KÜNSTE #Take Care

Sunday 25/5

Louis Schou-Hansen – Tragedy
Time: 14.00-17.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, floor 1
You may come and go as you wish in the performance installation.

Tragedy is an all-consuming space, where two miserable fictional characters enact a slow, endlessly looping nightmare. This dreamscape takes the shape of an entrapment, a labyrinth without walls, a site where Western cultural tropes from the baroque until now take shape as disordered compulsions: lap dances, star-crossed lovers, cowboy fantasies, dying swans, court des ballets, still lives, and Hollywood sex. Tragedy is a non-emotional burial ground for an undying history—a form of time in decay.

In 2019, artist and theorist Alina Popa wrote in one of her final essays, “The body is real, but what we think about it is fiction.” While alluding to the “real” as the material properties of the body, such as flesh, bones, blood, skin, etc. Popa also points to the body as a disciplined container where complex fictional realities are cultivated until they penetrate our skin and stick to our flesh as something true. Drawing on an expanded interpretation of Popa’s 2019 quote, Tragedy explores the body and its surroundings as a complex network of destructive Western fictions where all of us become violent agents of a dying world.

Performance, sound and costumes: Louis Schou-Hansen
Performers: Thjerza Balaj & Elise Nohr Nystad
Textile work: Karoline Bakken Lund
Photos: Chai Saedi
Outside eye: Alexandra Tveit
Trailer/Documentation: Chris Helberg
Funded by: Arts Council Norway and PAHN – Performing Arts Hub Norway
Co-production: Podium Oslo

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Watch me bake is an enabling performing arts collective based in Uppsala with the aim of promoting the presence of movement-based art. The association consists of professionals active in dance and performing arts, where each individual has their own interests that are explored both individually and in groups. Watch me bake organizes events focussing on creating spaces for artists and audiences to meet in a permissive environment with low thresholds. The occasions frequently focus on works in progress where artists can show something that is under development and the audience gets the opportunity to “test-talk” about the experience using various methods presented during the events.The group members are Linéa Alfredsson, Ida Mandrén, Erika Martikainen, Wilma Richards Jonasson and Line Jonsdotter.

Jen Rosenblit (1983. USA) makes performances based in Berlin after many years in New York City, surrounding architectures, bodies, text, and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny, locating ways of being together amidst (un) familiar and impossible contradictions. Desire and sexuality linger as reoccurring points of departure without demanding a singular aesthetic or representation. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque(Vevey, CH) artist in residence and has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K.Burns and Philipp Gehmacher.
www.jenrosenblit.net

Louis Schou-Hansen (b. 1992, Aarhus, DK) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer employing choreography, theory, text and installation to situate the body as a domain of fiction. From here, its work dives into assemblages of corrupted bodies, failed sex, re-animations of history, and the production of desire. Louis holds an MA from The Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and a BA from Oslo National Academy of Dance (KHIO). Their works have recently been presented by venues including the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), NADA – New Art Dealers Alliance (New York), Dansens Hus (Oslo), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen) II Magazine (Rome), Black Box Theater (Oslo), Centrale Fies (Dro), Copenhagen Contemporary (CPH), Suprainfinit Gallery (Bucharest), and My Wild Flag (Stockholm). In 2023, they were shortlisted for the Sandefjord Kunstforening’s art prize together with Harald Beharie, and since 2024, they have initiated and curated MIND EATER, a festival for emerging arts and performance, together with Runa Borch Skolseg.

Laia Estruch was born in Barcelona 1981 where she lives and works. She has a e a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (2010) and studied Performance Art and Sound Art at The Cooper Union University in New York (2010). The artistic practice delves into the language of the body and the voice, on the threshold between sculpture and performance. Her projects analyse the emotional possibilities of the a cappella voice and the body, opening a space for reflection in relation to the performative nature of language, sound recording and its oral archive. Sculptural sets, conceived as scenes or spaces of experimentation allow her to activate the body and the word through the voice, sound and gesture.
Laia Estruch has received grants, awards and residencies and has presented performances in numerous museums and festivals in Barcelona, such as MACBA, Antoni Tàpies Foundation, to the Fundació, Joan Miró in Barcelona, the Picasso Museum, but also internationally such as, Travesía Cuatro GDL, México (2024); ‘After Paradise’, Triënnale Kortrijk, Bélgica (2024, Chapelle des the Beaux-Arts, Paris (2017). Currently she presents an acclaimed solo show at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid (2025). She is represented in private and public collections and is part of the Public Heritage of the city of Barcelona with the donation of the sculpture ‘Playground Scene’ installed in the Contemporary Art Center Fabra I Coats, MACBA Collection.

Maja Fredin was born 1992, in Uppsala and is currently living in Stockholm. She has an MFA i CRAFT!, textile art from Konstfack 2022. The artistry is built on performative installations that allow the viewer to become part of her everyday choreography. She sees her works as a reflection of society— the fetish for consumerism, dysmorphophobia, food, and her own decay. With a broad mix of humour and rancid kitsch, she twists and turn reality, expand delusions, and invite the audience to interpretation of the already impossible world that we live in. Her art dwells in the borderland between laughter and profound seriousness with a strong believe that art can truly make a difference. In 2023 Fredin was the Maria Bonnier Dahlin grant recipient, and she is represented at KiN – Konstmuseet i Norr and the collections of Maria Bonnier Dahlin foundation.

Deva Schubert is a choreographer with a focus on vocal practices based in Berlin. She was born 1991 and has studied dance in Salzburg, Kassel, Copenhagen and at HZT Berlin, as well as Fine Arts at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. At the intersection of dance, installation, and digital media, her works address questions of intimacy, collectivity, and synergies of transdisciplinary practices. As a dancer and performer, she has worked for Isabelle Schad, Michael Portnoy and Julie Favreau at festivals such as the Venice Biennale, documenta 14 and steirischer herbst. In 2020, she participated in the education and exchange programme danceWEB at ImPulsTanz. Her work was shown at Kunsthalle Zürich, Gessnerallee Zürich, Uppsala Art Museum / Revolve Closer 2019, Radialsystem Berlin, and Transart festival in Bolzano. In recent years, she has been researching the connection between AI and culture with Mosaick Collectiv. Her current work GLITCH CHOIR premiered in June 2023 at Reinbeckhallen Berlin and is opening Tanztage Berlin 2024 at Sophiensæle. In 2024 she was awarded the ImPulsTanz – Young Choreographers’ Award for the work.