Video installation and performative filmic research

Danse Macabre is part of the research project, Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image. The project has been exploring the capacity of the Moving Image and the Laughing Body for new and alternative modes of thinking, acting and being, and their potential to overturn our habitual course and change the order of things. It has been organised around four interests: Visuality, Affect, Embodiment and Polyphonic Montage. By shifting the attention away from images as forms of representations, to images as matter and waves of psychic intensities and fields of individuation, the project has explored communication not as a correct exchange of information, but rather as a clash and a coming together of forces. Through montage it has let the Moving Image itself become a theorizing subject, and to have it form the foundation for a series of screenings, events and discussions that, together with artists, researchers, theorists, students and audience, have been exploring the limits of knowing, through the possibilities of non-knowledge. Like the sudden invasion of laughter that for a moment sets us off course, it has been exploring ways in which we, organisms, bodies, technologies and environments communicate beyond instrumental language, subjectivity and reason, to experience what the moving image and our bodies can do and how they can teach us about the limits of our thinking.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council (2017-03110) and hosted by Kungl. Konsthögskolan/Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

DANSE MACABRE was shot in London in autumn 2019 during the protests and demonstrations related to Brexit dominated the streets,as well as in Winter 2020 shortly before the outbreak of Covid-19 radically re-structured the sphere of the public. Both events brought states of exception and a temporary suspensions of law. With a focus on dance and affectual politics, the film takes a closer look on what gestures and bodily expressions are provoked through the current state of crises, but also how order and disorder are inscribed in bodies and movements in public space. Through new friendships, disorder, dark humour, and erratic moving bodies and voices the film explores acts of resistance, the politics of performance, visibility, and queerness in order to to bring up urgent questions around xenophobia, closing borders, and the politics of fear.