SUN EATERS
dance performance - art installation - performance lectures
with Harald Beharie, Charlott Utzig and Paolo De Venecia Gile
Unveiling the bond between
petropolitics and petrodemonology
Oil is a labyrinth filled with gore, ancient gods and revolutionary acts. It is the intimate language of our access to the world, the ‘magnificent sorcerer’ of our lifetime. Petrol can be spelled as a lyrical, mythopoetic and incarnated object, generating impossible landscapes and pestilential beasts. To understand and access oil, we invented a language that requires both the presence of living bodies and the baroque cruelty of critical fabulation.
Oil is a deadly pearl, and its true nature arises when its name is sung in many forms at the same time: poems, chants, dances, tales, sculptures, and gatherings
‘one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a vehicle for epic narratives. To instrumentalize oil (...) is like feeding on the Devil’s excrement or its derivatives; there is always the danger of being poisoned to death or even worse.’
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia
The story we want to tell uses the mythological and performance culture of both the Middle East and the Norwegian West Coast. It is a mythopoetic work: to access contemporary worlds and complex objects, such as Oil, through dance and storytelling. Oil operates within our political subconscious, haunting our everyday life. Oil is a myth making machine: it is the fabric of present and future stories, host of demons, creator of worlds, master of betrayal. A mystical material, older than modernity, Oil is a viscous poem hidden in darkness. It is not a simple fact: it is a betraying matter, not to be trusted, a mastery of camouflage, shifting from hardened fossil to nylon stocking, volatile biotoxins to microplastics. It survives by deceiving, it charms you, and pulls you into its darkness.
Sina and Jassem are contemporary storytellers. Both of them fuse philosophy with middle eastern cosmology, hauntology, ancient and contemporary poems, favouring multilingual approaches, digressions, cruelty and playfulness, multiplicity of characters, and discontinuous systems.
DATES
Exhibition opening: 26th of January 2024 Podium Oslo
Dance performance premiere: 2nd of April 2024 - RAS - Sandness
Production:
Kultur direktoratet - Arts and Culture Norway
RAS - Regional Arena for Samtidsdans - Sandnes
Beursschouwburg - Bruxelles
MDT - Stockholm
WpZimmer - Antwerp
Frascati Theater - Amsterdam
Grenland Friteater - Porsgrunn
Hindi-Gouédard production - Porsgrunn
