Aggregate
Public art project, ART Basel
Choreography: Alexandra Pirici
Duration: 4 hours
It was a privilege to experience Alexandra Pirici’s way of working, to witness her intelligence, to perform within her art form of “aggregate”, to be part of a collective body of 60 performers, and to be a living embodiment of history.
An excerpt from above website:
“Aggregate” is a performative environment created by the Romanian artist Alexandra Pirici, and curated by Cecilia Alemani for Messeplatz Basel, in a newly-designed temporary pavilion conceived by Andrei Dinu, a frequent collaborator of Pirici's. Pirici explores structures of power and symbolic manifestations of history, alongside individual and collective notions of bodily presence. In her performative pieces she often stages ensembles in which actors and dancers represent historical events and ‘rematerialize’ both well and lesser known artworks, compositions which range from minimal actions to vast, living landscapes combining dance, choreography, sculpture, performance, and digital technology.
Alexandra Pirici brings over 60 performers together, forming a vast collective body through the accumulation of individual gestures, enveloping its audience in intricate choreographies and rehearsed compositions. By using gestures and sounds which are taken from both natural and popular media sources, Pirici renders disparate forms of heritage and cultural memory, conceiving Aggregate as a time capsule in which fragments of vernacular culture, art history, and everyday life are given new, living embodiments.
By identifying and highlighting fragments of our collective consciousness, Aggregate invites its viewers to reflect on how identities are constructed and performed, and how collectivity is built through the selective recollection, replication, and hybridization of knowledge. Thus, Pirici urges us to confront our commonalities and envision society itself as a subjective, living body of shared memories and behaviors.
Photo Credits: Alexandra Pirici, Jürg Ramseier
