Interstitial activities y pa amb tomàquet // Martina De Dominicis (IT/AT)

Thu 23.1.2025 // 19.30

Research presentation
Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Vienna // pay as you wish // drinks & food // Duration: 30-40 min (space will be open for 30 min, afterwards Martina will perform some of the scores for 10 minutes) // Please bring a mobile phone and headphones with you!

CHANGING SPACES Vienna–Barcelona 2024
Im_flieger Vienna in cooperation with nunArt Barcelona
Residency: 17.11.–15.12.2024
More about nunArt here.

On 12 December 2024 Martina De Dominicis shared the results of her residency at nunArt Barcelona.

Research: Martina De Dominicis
“Cavities that can host” songs/sound design: Manuel Riegler
Conversation partner: Laura Vilar

During her four-week residency at nunArt in Barcelona as part of Im_flieger CHANGING SPACES International, Martina De Dominicis focussed on reflecting on and “digesting” her latest work Latente. At the research presentation, the audience will be invited to a hybrid format and will have 30 minutes to navigate at their own pace through a course of scores that will be installed in the space. Afterwards, Martina De Dominicis will dance some of the scores for 10 minutes.

Martina De Dominicis:
“During my time at nunArt I have mainly spent time digesting the process that led to the presentation of my latest piece Latente. I have been questioning what it means to digest something that is not food and wondered whether that is something I could actively do. Or if it is something that is anyway happening to me.
I played with the words eating, digesting, absorbing nutrition, excretion and fertilizing and replaced them with moments and aspects of my artistic process: things i have read or watched, people and practices i worked with, the way they fed me, the material that got created, the way it left my body to maybe reverberate into another body.

The sensation of void and loss accompanied by a heartbreaking fulfillment that quickly vanishes, has produced a state of not knowing what to do now. I am quite sure that many performance artists experience this state after creating works.

To be here and take the time to allow these feelings to simply be is something I would call privilege. 

To be able to make art it’s also a privilege. 

The topic of privilege brought me to invest into something I wanted to explore since a long time but that I never had the chance to do: 
to artistically work with the overwhelming love and gratitude I have for my grandmother, with the constant feeling of missing her and with a strange anticipated melancholia for the day she will be gone.

She and her corporeal experience became the source of my daily practice here at nunArt. I had many phone calls with her, I engaged with her whistling practice and listened and danced to her favorite songs.
As during the creative process for Latente, I tried to go over the borders of my lived experience and extend my own perception through reverberating others’ corporealities and empathize with others’ existences. I have done it with people i haven’t even met but always fascinated me, to try to feel what they feel.

This time is dedicated to my grandmother’s corporeal existence, her life of endless labour and caregiving, her life under heavy patriarchal structures and her lack of freedom to even sing or dance… 
with the wish to give her a privilege that she doesn’t have but that, also thanks to her, i happen to have.
To create a metaverse history of her.
To rewrite an alternative narrative that escapes the notion of a temporal past or future.
To invite her and let her move into my context, while I move into hers… through this small dance of the in-between.

In the room you will find some scores that you are free to engage with at your own pace. They are a proposal to get a glimpse of how I spent my days at nunArt. You can follow your own order.

At the end there will be some food of my childhood that she prepared everyday for me, which happens to be one of the most common tapas in the Catalan tradition. Which I also ate kind of everyday as part of my practice.”