à residence (2015)

triptych, durational performance and video installation

Kunstlerhaus Bremen

à residence is a performance installation for Kunstlerhaus in Bremen, Germany. Throughout the month-long exhibition, DAZWISCHENTRETEN, which translates to 'Intervene,' à residence transitions from live to trace, body to video, by taking place within three peripheral spaces - driveway, rooftop, stairwell - of the haus. 

 Continuing Bell's investigation of dance's domestic spaces, à residence highlights the precarious and transient nature of the residency space, a temporary home for the artist. The residency site is conceived as a utopian elsewhere that overflows with the partial, fragmented presence of contemporary conditions/concerns for making work - one has almost always already moved on to the next scene, to the future event, to the tenuous prospects of that next landing site.

 A dance crystallizes for each architectural setting in and around the Kunstlerhaus - driveway, rooftop, stairwell - opening up to its outside, creating its own affective currency as an archi-choreographically conceived "structure of feeling."

 à residence takes its name from Jacques Derrida's discussion of the archive, "a house, a domicile, an address, the residence," where dance is thought as a figure that thwarts, disrupts, escapes, and intervenes within its locale, that "changes place and above all changes places." Dance is, ultimately, a sign of life exemplar.

at Kunstlerhaus Bremen; part of group exhibition Dazwischentreten, curated by Katrin Heinz, Mariann Steegmann Institut; Fanny Gonella, Künstlerhaus Bremen; Mona Schieren, Hochschule für Künste Bremen