“Queer Magick Intervention” is the first collaboration between composer and installation artist Wojtek Blecharz (1981, Poland) and choreographer and performance maker Vala T. Foltyn (1986, Poland), which they develop for and against the site of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds. In their genre- and discipline-crossing practices, the artists often address political issues of recent history, such as the Nazi dictatorship or current queerphobia, and they search for new modes of emancipatory practices, queering spirituality, rituals and aesthetics as a gesture of witching.
In this case study they voice the haunting of a specific location; a century old villa located in Kraków, Poland. The villa was a key location during the Nazi occupation as a ressistance site for female officers of the Home Army, and in recent years became an independent art venue for queer artists run by Foltyn and Lamella queer arts collective. For this occasion the artists also invite other collaborators to brewing and witching the difficult pasts and unfold the queer futures with Sall Lam Toro, Phyllis Akinyi, Nicolas Navarro Rueda.
Wojtek Blecharz is a pioneer in the format which we would like to term music installations. With a classical training in composition, he gained international recognition for a series of opera installations in which various embodiments of sound collapsed the traditional divisions between stage and audience, sound and resonating body. He moves freely between acoustic instrumental composition and analog-electronic sound synthesis, and often uses language and performative elements to create expansive gesamtkunstwerke in time and space, most of which actively involve the audience.
Vala T. Foltyn is a performance artist who’s work is greatly informed by artistic research and queer methodologies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and choreographer, her often process-based and community-oriented work seeks connections between art, activism and belonging, and revolves around witchcraft, writing and installation. The power of soft resistance and poetic rebellion find incantatory expressiveness in her intimate, ritualistic performances.
“Queer Magick Intervention” is a sound walk and ritual that engages an archive of Nazi resistance fighters from Kraków. Within the context of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, the territories of violence are explored and reshaped through queer and spiritual gestures of transfiguration.
Kongresshalle – Ehemaliges Reichsparteitagsgelände Bayernstraße 110
90471 Nuremberg
Meet at starting time of the event across the tram station “Dokuzentrum”. Bring warm clothes, the colosseum is cold inside.
Google Maps link to exact location
THU
FRI
SAT
SUN
Nicolas Navarro Rueda (costumes)
Joanna Ostrowska (archive consultant)
