Performance: Planetaria

.sight.specific. proposes performance art as the staging of sight as site: observation as contour, terrain, and architecture for modes of aesthetic embodiment. The project consists of four commissioned live works in search for situated perspectives on the possibilities of performance as a contextual spatial practice. The works situate artists and audience by trading knowledge on the streets, tracing trans-planetary sight-lines, creating home and hospitality in real time through cyberspace, and staging variations on absurdity. The shapes of these relationships brings into focus questions of knowledge and memory, contact and distance, longing and belonging.

Curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados

About the performance, by Ricky Varghese:

A sight specific engagement with the figure of the narrator entails a telling of the double bind of its position of privilege, a staging of its fragmentation. In Cressida Kocienski’s Planetaria, this figure is situated through the specificity of the voice. Kocienski’s performance lecture narrates the space of the McLaughlin Planetarium in downtown Toronto through a hybrid character: half woman, half meteorite.

A burning chunk of intergalactic rock lodges in her throat, dividing her voice. The piece uses text-based live action and electronic elements to give an elliptical account of the meteor’s passage from a distant object of observation to an observer returning the gaze at outer space. The telling of this trajectory provides a critical perspective on humanity’s attempt at looking for an absolute other as an object of knowledge.

The artist embodies a woman-meteor metaphor that speaks of constellations and the ways in which their naming follows the history of European domination. The story takes on the shape of politicized inter-planetary sight lines. Kocienski reshapes the contours of narrative itself to trace a fictional cosmic architecture that re-imagines the undue privilege and the burden placed on sight in a Greco-Roman tradition that became the template for the imagination of the crumbling ‘Western’ worldview. Planetaria assumes the privilege of the narrator while staging its fragmentation through the creation of a hybrid, peripatetic voice. Here, sight specificity is embodied through an emphasis on sound, bringing into view the imagined space of a migrating body. 

——

Performed at Xpace, Toronto, 2013

Performed at Peckham Literary Festival, 2016