I had the pleasure of experiencing Danu, an incredible performance that emerged from a workshop by Smirna Kulenovic during this ARS Electronica festival of 2022. “Danu” is a reference to the Donau river where the ARS Electronica Museum, and Linz Künkstuniversitat (where Smirna is currently earning an MFA) sit, I also can’t help but surmise it is a reference to the phrase “Yeah, well…”, “Nevermind”, or “whatever”, but also, if said with emphasis, “Wow!” which is pronounced “Da nu” in many Slavic and Slavic adjacent languages.
It was such a pleasure to see a project focused on ritual and direct action displayed prominently in the DeepSpace showcase, where every other project I witnessed was a collaboration between Futurelab members and teams from corporations such as Wacom and Cisco to name a few–a disturbing development to say the least, given that ARS is a state institution. You can read more on my take on that here.
Of course, nothing can hold a candle to the epic multi-media extravaganza that was “Mother Gilgamesh” (you can watch the whole thing here: it is insane, and totally falls into the great populist tradition of the Symphony of Sirens), or beat the studied eloquence of Laurie Anderson’s concert with the Brno Philharmonic. But in terms of new media performance Danu was the one. Danu is set in a festival grappling with its increasing complicity with letting the R+D of Art happen under the watchful gaze of corporate surveillance and extraction practices, it highlights the idea of the surveillance gaze on the human corpora, and our complicity in the sustainability and unsustainability of our environment all at the same time.
It was made by Smirna Kulenovic (BA), Damian Cortes-Alberti (AR), Julia Moser (AT), Alejandra Benet Garcia (ES), Laura Gagliardi (IT), Lucia Mauri (IT), Ariathney Coyne (EL/US), Alessia Rizzi (IT), Lina Pulido Barragan (CO), Sara Koniarek (AT), Maria Dierneder (AT), Felix Chang (AT), Dafni Xantholopolou (EL).
The concept the artists came up with in their workshop is as follows:
We are all Bodies of Water: Re-enchanting the Vulva, re-spiriting the Danube, inviting the magic back into our oceanic beginnings. Entangled between our menstrual blood and primeval waters of Dānu, we embody our ancestral river myths through our common microbes, dancing. Leaking, sponging, and dissolving our human watery bodies, we invite the audience into a ritualistic gaze of interacting dependency — a mystical relationship with our larger, ecological, Bodies of Water.
A very appropriate concept for our rising sea levels, diminishing resources, war-torn world in which womxn are still not fully human subjects endowed with all the rights of bodily autonomy that men have.
DANU explores the topics of ritualistic microperformativity of the river and channeling embodied ecological liquids. Working in the intersection between bacterial growth patterns and dance notation systems, we will explore how water-based microbes influence rituals and how can rituals evolve from observing microbes. This workshop brings together MA students from University of Arts and Design Linz (Interface Cultures) and Anton Bruckner Private University (Dance Institute) – to a practice-based transdisciplinary collaboration, through which they experience the process of co-creating a performance for AEC Deep Space 8K. The final result of the workshop will premiere in Ars Electronica Festival 2022, with the technical support of Ars Electronica FutureLabs. All students will be mentored and guided through the process of transdisciplinary research, conceptualization, collaboration and materialization of a joint performance for the interactive environment of Deep Space 8K.
As the central point of the intersection between the concepts of micro and macro ecologies and rituals, or the microbial-human-ecosystem relationship – is our local ecological context, the river Danube.
The performance certainly had the most connection with this year’s theme while at the same time, being experimental, forward thinking, and fresh–although aesthetically it was quite retro with its webcam security system aesthetics, video switching, and interpretive dance. The performance/ritual included participatory actions from the audience, we were instructed to lie down, walk around in circles, carry water, combine and separate and pass around water from a central amphère, and recline in a projection of water from the Donau. Both movements were womxn-lead and choreographed, and the entire workshop team was made up of ladies. This combination of female energy, ritual, and communal action around water was one of the more moving performances in the festival. And unlike many of the others its importance didn’t hinge on some novelty of technique or the development of a new hardware or software. The novelty in the performance lay in its approach and relation to its material.
Smirna, the workshop leader is not new to ritual as art. You can see her very powerful work “Our Family Garden II: Prva Ženska Linija” which enacts a ritual of 100 womxn planting calendula in the Sarajevo trenches left behind 1992-1995 siege. This performance is not only a ritual in and of itself but has a lasting effect on the ecosystem where it took place. Comparing “Our Family Garden II: Prva Ženska Linija” to “Danu” in DeepSpace falls quite flat of course. A momentary participatory water-carrying ritual at one of the best funded Electronic Arts festivals of Europe/The World seems surface-level indeed compared to a garden sowing ritual in the trenches of a war by the people left behind. But I can’t help to have felt that it mattered, as a commentary on the resources we do have left to share and the international collaboration of good-hearted anonymous strangers necessary to make such a thing happen. Maybe outside the framework of shared trauma, and deep shared cultural identity, collaborations towards growth and sharing to seem small and surface level but those small surface collaborations are the only way we move forward together when we have neither culture nor language to keep us on the same path. If we can only carry those resources to and from their source without spilling them or tripping on our fellow human beings that are crammed into the performance space, then there is hope for this Europe in gas crisis, this planet in war and resource crisis to thrive. Wow indeed! Or you know, whatever.
About the author:
Sofy (@_the_s0urce_) is a site-specific media artist and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Sofy’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s affect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Audio-Visual Composition at NYU GSAS.
